


This Time, It Wasn't the End

by wirewrappedlily



Category: Original Work
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, F/M, Gen, Ghosts, Hellhounds, Platonic Soul Bond, Platonic Soulmates, Succubi & Incubi, Vampires, and at this point i need some kind of feedback, don't ask: just read it, so i wrote a sterek years ago and was told it should be an original work, this is the first chapter of my attempt to do that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2020-11-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:01:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 14
Words: 50,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27033094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wirewrappedlily/pseuds/wirewrappedlily
Summary: “Kidnapping, catastrophe, espionage, death, dismemberment, and hard work for shitty pay: why do I let you talk me into these things?”
Relationships: Hades/Persephone
Comments: 5
Kudos: 2





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, so. 
> 
> I wrote a Sterek of the same title many moons ago, and was working on an original work to go with it. I've been working on it for all of those moons. Now, I need some feedback. Much like its predesessor, this one has come...mind-bogglingly close to being deleted in its entirety too many times to count. 
> 
> And please be absolutely without restraint on your criticism.

“Kidnapping, catastrophe, espionage, death, dismemberment, and hard work for shitty pay: why do I let you talk me into these things?”

Barking a laugh as a shower of crystal and glass fell from the destroyed chandelier above them, the Honourable Lina Hughes reloaded her pistol with the bullets her partner in crime, Hunter Dyan, had been carrying: a negotiation of peace that they were representatives for meaning that she carried an unloaded pistol, and he carried the bullets with no gun. "As if I could've talked you out of it." 

Grunting slightly, Lina twisted to take aim at the interlopers that had opened fire on their summit, only for Hunter to pull her back just as the piece of table that she had been crouched behind for cover was blasted to smithereens. Hunter's amber-coloured eyes were distant, calculating, and Lina made no move to resume her position to fire before he had completed whatever equation ran through his head. 

Cowering on Hunter's other side, the adolescent succubus that had been kidnapped by the reigning vampire coven of Budapest in retaliation for the succubi accidentally picking up one of the vampires' virgins was having trouble controlling her powers in the face of the danger. The overwhelming undertow of lust was so thick it was an actual taste at the back of Lina's throat. Any consideration towards just why the aforementioned interlopers didn't seem to pause for a moment as they undoubtedly were hit with a desire that could stop a truck didn't bear furtherance. 

"You're not going to like this," Hunter sighed, his gaze focusing once more on her as he reached forwards and ducked the succubus down a fraction to avoid a piece of shrapnel to the side of the head. 

Lina's full mouth pressed into a thin line, tucking downwards at the corners, "Just what am I not going to like, darling?" 

Hunter winced at her tone, his shoulders tensing as if bracing for a blow. "I need you to fire there," Hunter pointed at a barren patch of ceiling near the half-destroyed chandelier, "and take her and jump out of the window." At the narrowed eyes and pursed lips, Hunter sighed, "And I'll get the human--" the human that was in an unconscious pile of limbs at the feet of the trigger-happy imbeciles trying to kill them meant little, knowing Hunter, "and meet you down there." 

Mouth falling open to protest, Lina was utterly unsurprised when she really didn't get the chance: her grip on the gun tightening as Hunter reached for it, knowing immediately that if he was willingly reaching for the gun, then she needed to do what he'd asked of her. 

Even Lina didn't know the full extent of his experiences in the war: the full, crushing repercussions of his call to arms at age eighteen. What she knew was that Hunter eschewed guns whenever he could avoid it--and as a consequence, he had come to depend upon her to help him avoid it. That he was such a good shot that he'd once shot a bullet out of the air could hold no bearing when it came to protecting him. 

Lina fired where he had told her to fire, the timing of it something incredible as there was a tiny window in which the barrage lulled, and in that lull, following the impact of Lina's bullet, there was a loud squeal of struggling metal, wrenching apart. 

The momentum of the hit had the chandelier swinging precariously, and even as Lina gathered up the succubus, she could half-watch from the corner of her eye as it swept towards their armed interruption and simply _gave_. Hunter's arm whipped out, the hilt of the knife he'd had tucked into his boot impacting with the window Lina and the succubus were meant to be jumping from the barest of moments before Lina had slung the young one into her arms and thrust them both towards the window. The shattering of glass didn't touch either of them, because Hunter was nothing if not meticulous when it came to protecting Lina, and the fall from the third-storey window was truncated by the vampires that had been using their powers to lurk. 

Being caught by shadow made solid was headache-inducing: Lina's human instincts reacting to the threat of both the fall and the unseen force catching her from it. 

As her boots touched the cobbles, Lina tipped her head to the side, listening as the meeting room was invaded by two other vampires; the sounds of violence unmistakable as the vampire that had caught her rippled into solidity before her, taking a deliberate step back once she was steady on her feet. 

"Miss Hughes, you're bleeding." The soft, measured voice of the vampire was utterly neutral, his fingers alighting on her left forearm to tilt the wound into view. "Your right calf also has a piece of crystal protruding from it." 

Now that it had been called to attention, Lina could feel it, and she winced. "Thank you, Martin." 

"Keep your weight from it if you can. I can support you if you need it, and we'll get it patched up as soon as Hunter comes down." 

Lina smiled, flashing dimples at the soft-spoken vampire who had called them in to negotiate a cessation of hostilities between the coven and the family of succubi. "Thank you for the save, but we both know there's no need for the medical attention." 

Martin scoffed softly, "As if you lot ever actually need to be rescued." 

There was a protest from above them: a familiar one, to Lina. Hunter hated heights, but particularly loathed them when he had to trust in someone else to help him through them. "No, I can _walk_!" The last was half-shrieked as one of the two vampires that had come to aid Hunter swooped through the broken window, Hunter's unwieldy sprawl of limbs as close to tucked up as Lina had ever seen someone manage. 

Judging by the state of Hunter's wild mess of red-brown hair, Lina knew that her own curls would be hellishly tangled with splinters, glass, and the detritus of their escapade. "You could walk, but this is more fun." Martin agreed with a hint of laughter in his voice. 

Hunter rolled his eyes, colour burning high in his cheeks and the tips of his ears as he was set down even more delicately than Lina had been. Hunter's hand slid over to hers, and just with a touch, Lina knew that he had healed the damage done--even if it meant that he swayed minutely in place for a moment before he seemed to shake off the effects healing always brought him.

"You do realize that this doesn't win you points towards Hunter becoming your princess of darkness, don't you?" Lina asked, laughing at the murderous look that flashed over Hunter's features at the mention of the intent that Martin had made no bones about. 

Flashing fangs as he grinned, Martin waved his hands expressively, as if batting the implication away. "You won't let me close anyway, my dear, so why not have a little bit of fun in the meantime?" 

Hunter raised a brow, and though Lina had to agree with Hunter that doubting Martin's actual capitulation that he'd stop pursuing Hunter, she could also hear a tremulous thread of actual surrender in the vampire's voice. 

Heaving a breath, Hunter looked to the succubus Lina was doing her best to ignore, sliding his jacket from his arms and draping it over her thin shoulders. "We ought to get you home." Shooting a look at Martin, who raised his hands in actual supplication, Hunter's jaw tightened as he offered the young one his arm to escort her back to her people. 

"We'll be having a party tonight," Martin offered, "As the guests of honour, I thought I'd do well to let you know." 

Lina could almost hear Hunter gritting his teeth, but she unfurled a smile that she'd long perfected in her tenure as a supposedly-airheaded heiress. "An honour, Martin--" 

"You needn't have to make an appearance, either of you. But _we_ would be honoured if you did." Martin told her steadily, impressing the seriousness of his assurance that neither of them actually had to be there. 

Martin and the two of them had long been friends; Martin had given them one of their first cases, just after Hunter had come back from the war and Lina had been released from the hospital stay that had resulted in Hunter's returning home. Martin, of all the men and women Hunter and Lina had encountered over the years, understood them best, Lina thought. He went out of his way to make sure that Hunter was comfortable in a way that Hunter couldn't object to, because it was subtle enough that Hunter rarely noticed. Hunter's insistence that his heart would only ever belong to Lina, even if she only ever loved him platonically in return, had never deterred the care the vampire showed him; and nor would it, Lina knew. Martin wasn't in love with Hunter, either; just simply more willing to find some small comfort from someone, even if it wasn't the right one. 

When they had arrived in Budapest, Hunter had been sent to cavort with the succubi while Lina had attended to manipulating the vampires into a call of armistice. In large part, Lina had agreed to that division of labour simply because she knew that Hunter's patience had been wearing thin, and would be better suited to dealing with the succubi if only because the succubi had acquired their captive accidentally, and _wanted_ to give him back. 

Watching him walk away with the succubus now, Lina welcomed the presence of Martin at her side, his golden eyes stuck on Hunter's back as he guided the girl through the night with a steady hand. "He's not effected." Martin noted. 

Lina twisted to look properly at Martin, meeting the vampire's dry, knowing gaze. "What do you mean, he's not effected?" 

"I mean...the succubus is too young to control her power, it's leaking all over him. But he's not feeling it." Lina opened her mouth to argue that of course felt lust--but Martin raised a quelling hand, "I've been thinking about it, Lina. The only person he has ever remotely shown any desire towards has been you." 

Frowning, Lina turned to watch as the virgin and the second vampire, rather covered in blood, emerged; the vampire wrapped around the human tightly and holding the boy lovingly. 

The vampires of Budapest, under Martin's leadership, had chosen a peaceful life in the most wholesome way Lina had ever seen accomplished by creatures that were, for all intents and purposes, supposedly monsters. The vampires of Budapest and the far-flung off shoots of their coven established themselves to be feared, but more than feared: they established themselves to be respected. 

They'd established themselves as a pillar of the community, even while the rumours of their vampirism had bubbled to the surface. 

Martin and the coven leaned into those rumours, though only just enough to scare the curious humans who'd otherwise cause trouble back into their wits. The coven ran a beloved orphanage: they took in wayward souls, and helped the community in ways that no others did--and for that reason, Hunter and Lina would not answer a call against them. 

As the vampire covered in blood relinquished the boy to Martin and the second, less-gruesome of their party in order to fade into the shadows and avoid scandal, Lina had to consider, not for the first time, just what it would come to were Hunter and Lina ever called to put an end to Martin and the family he had made for himself. 

They fed on the wicked only; turning no-one if they could help it, and putting an abrupt and brutal end to any monsters who thought they could hurt the innocent within the coven's territory. If Hunter and Lina were contacted, and they would have to be contacted through the proper channels, it would mean that a city carefully resting its foundations on the backs of those monsters in the night would crumble to ruin, which was just about the cleverest thing Lina could think of by way of both deterrent and vengeance. 

The hotel at which they'd met for the exchange did not contain the set of rooms that Hunter and Lina had chosen to board in during their stop-over, and as Lina began to head into the eerie greyness of the city's night, she knew that she was not walking alone, for all that she was the only one to be seen. 

It was not the creeping chill of a nameless fear that marked the movement of the vampires through the shadows: instead, Lina felt this...judgement, this speculation, as if she were being weighed and measured as she moved through the night. 

It was too much to hope that Hunter would have made it back to their rooms before her, but Lina was also well-aware that the ultimate decision regarding their attendance at the party to be thrown in their honour would lay with her anyway. Lina knew, to an extent, that Hunter's very nature was much more insular than anyone would have ever thought to accuse him of: but she also knew that they were walking a delicate knife's edge with the weight of his façade. Hunter needed time, she knew well though she didn't necessarily understand it. The true question was whether buying them one night would truly make that much of a difference, particularly when Hunter would, more than likely, be too concerned with their absence to make the most of his time to recharge. 

The signs were subtle, Lina would have to hand that to the spectral presence that had been following her, but as she moved about the rooms to make ready the show she and Hunter would put on for the vampires, Lina couldn't help but notice how the things she usually required for a night out simply seemed to fall into her hand as if she'd purposefully set them out. For anyone else, they would have dismissed these things as forethought; but Lina knew too well what it felt like to have eyes on her, especially when she couldn't find the eyes attached: there was something there with her, and that something wanted her to attend the party. 

"I'll play along here, but do try to remember that you aren't the first spook that Hunter's faced: I may not be armed against you, but he will be." In answer to her assertion, Lina could almost hear a rich bout of laughter, an inexplicable sensation of giddiness pouring through her as the almost-sound flooded the air around her. 

Pressing her full lips into a thin line to hide her smile, Lina obediently climbed into a bath to scrub away the lingering proof of her injuries, the idle wonder at just how badly-off Hunter would be a distraction from the lingering ache of strained muscles that Hunter couldn't have healed because she hadn't let him know about them. 

The strange dichotomy of the power to heal was one that Lina hated in a way that she couldn't fully express: In learning how to tap into that power, Hunter had made it impossible, as it was impossible for all healers, to be healed himself. Had it been a transference of injury, Lina would have brow beat him into figuring out how to forget the ability; as it was, Lina knew there was still something about the act of healing that he wasn't telling her, but she also knew that it wasn't outright doing him harm, so she would show patience in lulling him into a false sense of security with his secrets before prising them from him. 

Most healers, including the one that Hunter had learned the power from, didn't make it past the age of thirty, simply because they were useful enough that they always seemed to end up in the thick of fire--but every other healer, unlike Hunter, was born with the gift. Hunter was the only magic-user able to learn how to wield the powers he came across that they had ever found, and that alone was enough of a concern for Lina that if she allowed herself to face it, she may have simply locked Hunter away for his own damn good. 

With the scent of sandalwood drifting around her, Lina dared to allow her own magic to stretch its proverbial legs. 

Hunter's power of mimicry had been the one he'd been born with, but Lina's powers as a whole were not meant to be hers. Lina had inherited her powers in the worst way she could have: through the death of their original owner. As a result, Lina's powers were an ill-fit: more prone to chaos and destruction than Lina had ever wanted to be capable of. 

She still had nightmares about the battle in which she'd gained the magic: still woke up some mornings to find that in her sleep, she'd overloaded the electrical if they were staying somewhere with connection. Once, when her rooms had been broken into to be robbed in the night, she had woken the next morning to find three pillars of ash in half-melted boots. 

Her powers scared her more than anything she and Hunter had faced, or likely would face; but she knew, through Hunter, that the alternative to learning how to control them came at too great a price for them to really consider: To bind them, to place herself in a dampener, would negate all magic around her. No magic could be used by her, for her, or against her. 

Hunter had met someone in his travels who had been put in a dampener against their will; locked, forever, from the power itching and buzzing beneath the surface of their skin, unable to get out. If she was being honest with herself, Lina couldn’t think of anything worse than the claustrophobia of magic being trapped under the surface of skin. 

Lina’s magic skittered over the edges of the copper tub, the scent of ozone that came with electricity let loose managing to overpower the sandalwood tendrils of steam rising from the water as it grew hotter in response. It couldn’t hurt her, she knew, but there was something in her hindbrain that, because she had not grown into this power, still feared it. Letting it out, if only a little, had not conclusively proven to her that she would gain more control of it; but denying her new powers had certainly proven that they would strike out at her like a neglected cat. A nuisance only at first before blood began to be spilt. 

As the heavy tension of carrying the magic began to run from her shoulders, Lina relaxed further into the water—only for one of the lightbulbs over the vanity to burst under the tiny pressure of her power as her control slipped and the magic spread further than dancing around the tub. Wincing as she immediately yanked her magic back to her, Lina dunked herself under the water with a huff of resignation. 

Changing out the water once the grit had for the most part soaked off of her, Lina tried and failed to relax and wind down. It was the same tight tension that came when they were still in the thick of things: the same anxiety that told her that the job wasn't quite done yet, and though Lina loathed it, she knew she'd have to accept their invitation to the vampires' party before the feeling would wane. 

Twenty minutes later, Lina entered the grand hall that had been turned into a nightclub, the heavy weight of her gown only augmented by the number and range of weapons that she'd hidden within the green tourmaline-coloured skirt. The gown itself she had designed specifically to be heavy enough without the weaponry to keep the skirt in place: the green silk overthrown with a black lace that was studded with black jewels. The cut of it off of her pale shoulders was more than enough to show off her favourite scar: a bullet hole in the left shoulder, that had signalled the beginning of her partnership with Hunter. 

Her pride in that scar had garnered her more scandal than her acquisition of it: the assassination attempt at what would have been an engagement party to a man she had never met before, but her vile aunt had picked specifically was technically supposed to have been an attempt on Hunter's life, not hers. No, more likely than not, the attempt on her life had been meant for after the marriage contract, when the husband who would have killed her and the aunt that had hired him to would inherit. 

With her hair in the loose red curls that had become legendary along with Lina and Hunter's partnership, Lina allowed an indulgent smile as the young boy they'd extricated from the succubi came to her and awkwardly bowed, looking like he was unsure if he was seeing a god or a trick of the light. "Lady--Lady Hughes." 

"Jonathan, wasn't it?" She gave enough of a pause for his eyes to bug out, his nod shaking as if he were scared of her, "I take it your time with the sex-demons did not drain you too badly, which is good. If you could point me towards Martin, I'd be much obliged. You're a little young for my taste in escorts...No offence." 

The boy's ears went absolutely crimson, his head still ducked, not having recovered fully from the near-bow. He gestured towards the bar, where Martin was leaned against the polished wood and laughing to himself, golden eyes on her. 

"Exactly what stories have you been feeding these children that they're scared of little old me?" Lina asked when they drew close enough that she'd be able to hear the reply. 

"We feed them the truth as much as possible, but he's seen you in action now, so the truth with context is where the...intimidation is coming from, I'd wager." Martin laughed, handing her a drink. "You look lovely, by the way." 

"Thank you, Martin. I'm not sure when Hunter will be in, he wasn't yet returned to the rooms when I left." 

Martin jerked a small nod, "Word is, you're dating a god." 

Lina snorted, "'Dating' is generous. I touched an Indonesian fertility idol meant to bring someone their true love, and I got a god of sport." Martin winced, and Lina was thankful that she didn't have to put to words the problem with having a god of sport be the one that she was "meant" to be with. For as much as she did try to love him, he was undoubtedly a prick, and even more irrefutably ill-suited to being in a relationship. "We've come to an arrangement: he can _play the field_ ," there was not enough money in the world to pay Lina to keep the distaste for that pun out of her voice as she said it, "as much as he wants, but so, too, can I." 

Martin's eyes flicked over her, and she knew that Martin was well-acquainted with the story of Lina Hughes and Hunter Dyan; enough that he already knew the answer to his next question, "And how's that working for you?" 

The corner of Lina's mouth tucked in and down, and Martin gestured to order them each another drink without a word more, a show of silent understanding that the rest needed to go unsaid. 

Moving to settle on a low couch near the dancefloor, Martin regarded Lina with a cool expectancy, "So, what did you do with the idol?" 

"Returned it to its proper temple and upped their security. Neither of us are really sure who it was that stole it, but we do have our suspicions." 

Martin leaned back, "One of the gods of love?" 

Lina tucked her lips, but nodded, "Aphrodite is with Hephaestus, we know that...Hunter's cautious about it, particularly with the particular deities of love who are also deities of death or war. He thinks that the world could end up in another war if the world is knocked onto any more unstable ground. How better to sow dissension than to quietly squeeze every drop of love there is out of the world, and throw it all into in-fighting and chaos?" 

Martin regarded her, eyes narrowed slightly, "You say that as if you don't fear it, but you do. You and Hunter knew each other in the periphery before you ended up getting shot for him," golden eyes flicked down to the bullet scar displayed on her shoulder, "but you knew him well enough to see how the war changed him." 

Lina knew, in a general sense, that Martin and Hunter had crossed paths before she and Hunter had really begun their association, but it was strange to be faced with someone who seemed to at least see the change in the hyper-active young man that had left for the war, as opposed to the ever-composed creature that had returned from the battlefield wearing Hunter's skin. 

"The war was not easy for anyone, but you're right that to face another one would be the end for our dear Mr. Dyan." 

"I wasn't aware vampires were gifted with foresight." Lina managed, her hackles on-edge despite the fact that this was not a threat Martin was levelling against them. 

Martin barked a laugh, "Oh, foresight is _never_ a gift, Miss Hughes: it's a curse, and it always has been." Martin shook his head, "Have you ever heard of Cora Ó Faolían?" Martin smiled at the look of confusion that shot across Lina's face, nodding as if it was to be expected that she hadn't. "She was cursed with prophecy for disobeying Ares. All she foretold was bound to come true, but rather than turn anyone's disbelief against her as Cassandra came to suffer, Ares shackled her by making it so that she could relate all but a linchpin part of a prophecy that would be key to subverting it. Even in writing, her pen would produce languages that she herself could not understand. She could see it coming, and knew how to stop it, but she was powerless to do so." 

Lina's alabaster skin had paled further, the look of horror in her eyes speaking to the complete understanding of what it would be like to have knowledge that you would never be able to put to use. 

Opening her mouth to ask further, Lina almost missed the change in the atmosphere of the party that just managed to proceed the commotion that meant Hunter had arrived. 

Without knowing what she'd been wearing, Hunter had still managed to dress to match: his suit a deep green and shot through with the thinnest silver pinstripes, the stormy-grey necktie secured with a trinity knot and the black waistcoat festooned with silver dragons. Hunter looked good, as he always did, but there was something just slightly off in the way he moved and the smile he had pasted on. 

"He makes a lovely picture, considering he'd rather be anywhere other than here." Martin noted softly, a strain to his voice that Lina wasn't sure could be placed as wistfulness or sympathy. 

During their association, Lina and Hunter had made the choice to cultivate a reputation on Lina's part of being an unstoppable force to be reckoned with, and in turn garnering Hunter a reputation of approachability. Lina wasn't sure there was anyone alive who knew that Hunter was the one that could summon a cataclysm; that he had once tricked a trickster posing as a poltergeist into banishing himself forever from getting close to his target. Hunter chose his clothes carefully, held himself carefully; a measure at every aspect against appearing as viciously well-suited to this life as he was. 

The rumours ran rampant as a result of this: that Lina had tricked him into their partnership, or somehow bound him to her as a servant. At first, Lina had bristled at the mere implication that he was not an equal partner in their arrangement: just as stubborn and foolhardy as she was about stemming the dwindling flow of magic out of the world. But over time, Lina came to understand that the rumours were just as important to their reputation as Hunter's carefully-constructed illusion of weakness. For them to be truly underestimated, they had to let those that would do so think that it was possible to tear them apart. 

Watching the swirl of the party around Hunter, Lina admired the fact that though she was ready to drop her illusions with the vampires for the time being, Hunter was never not playing the part. His clothes were just ill-fitting enough to make them seem as though she had chosen them for him, and he had not allowed her to tailor them: his shoulders hunched just enough to belie just how broad they were while playing towards his height in a way that made the comparison to a beanpole blindingly easy. Women who would have fallen over themselves for someone like Hunter overlooked him; and men that should have known a threat when they saw one only dismissed him. 

"What drew you to Hunter?" Lina asked Martin, apparently apropos of nothing, though Martin was observing Hunter almost exactly the same way she had been. 

"A mutual friend. And like recognizes like, Lina. He is meant for someone he may never have." 

Eyes flashing, Lina whipped her head around to look at him, the demand for elaboration written clearly on her features. 

"I doubt anyone else would recognize the signs, but I am intimately familiar. Do you know what he dreams about when he doesn't dream of the war?" 

Lina's brow puckered with confusion, but she shook her head slowly. 

"He dreams of someone he can't reach. Someone he needs to get to; to save, to protect. But, whoever they are, they slip out of reach before he can even get close. He has a very powerful tether to someone, but it's someone he may never be able to make it to." The lull of Martin's voice made Lina's skin crawl: He spoke with such easy assurance that it was more ominous than anything Lina had faced in a long time. "There's something empty to his life, and you can feel that much, too, because that kind of emptiness has an echo in anyone who stands close enough to it." Martin's golden eyes cast over the room, lingering on the vampires who had stayed in his coven the longest. 

That Martin's coven splintered every few years was of little consequence unless something went direly wrong: Martin turned only those who brought goodness to the world and had no choice but vampirism to save their lives, and if they proved to want the power for power's sake, he and the elder members of the coven would kill the offending creature before any problems could really be caused. But Lina hadn't considered before, that Martin's coven splintering as it did could have a cause; and that cause could be Martin himself, and the emptiness he spoke of. 

"You're looking dire, darling." Hunter noted softly, joining them with a smoothness that made clear his act, and Lina knew at once that Martin had already known how deeply the act went. Hunter handed her a tumbler of amber liquid, and Lina found herself taking it with a hand that actually wavered slightly, the look of concern Hunter shot her over the tremor marked. "Well, direly beautiful, but..." 

Lina gathered herself, lifting her chin in an act of defiance that she couldn't muster the gumption to actually stand by, "But _what_?" 

For all of a few seconds, Lina's lips remained pursed slightly, but as Martin started giggling, the mask could not be kept in place. 

"What's got you bringing down the atmosphere?" Hunter asked, slumping next to Lina on the low couch with a lack of grace that spoke of complete disregard for both his suit and her dress. 

"I was expounding on just how ravishing a creature you are, and Lina was being blunt in letting me down." Martin lied smoothly. 

Hunter did not believe him for a second, and Lina could tell that without even looking at him. "Was that the ravishment of my winning personality, or the sheer physical allure?" 

"Has he seen you naked?" Lina demanded, turning an incredulous look on him with a toss of her red hair. Clinging to the lifeline from the undertow of implication that this familiar, teasing ground provided, Lina hoped without much faith that she could forget the slant of conversation that they had been traveling down. Hunter glanced at Martin, wincing dramatically enough that it signalled playing along, and Lina let out a cry of dismay, "Yet another person who's seen it all, but you still insist on your "modesty" with me?! Pish! Tosh! I am outraged at this blatant double-standard!" 

Martin leaned slightly more towards Hunter as if that in any way impeded Lina from the conversation, "Would it help or hinder your further survival if I were to admit to her that my eyeful only came of having to treat you for having been blown up?" 

Lina let out what could only be described as a 'squawk', and she flailed in much the same way Hunter would have, smacking him slightly as she did. 

The sound of Martin's rolling laughter felt like something akin to a balm as Hunter snorted into scoffing chuckles. Lina shook her head, "Where was this, and why were you blown up?" 

"France, and a small magical...oopsie." Martin answered readily, wincing over the last. 

"Whose fault was this 'oopsie'?" 

"Mine." Hunter sighed, "I hadn't realized I'd...picked something up." 

Martin's furrowed brow told Lina that Hunter hadn't explained to Martin quite what his powers were. As far as she knew, she was one of three people who knew; Hunter and a woman known as Olivia Owens, or Grams, being the other two. 

Lina wracked her memory of any hint that Hunter had any connection to fire-based powers, but came up blank. Hunter offered the tiniest of smirks, flipping his palm upwards and rubbing his thumb over his fingertips, flame erupting as if he'd struck a match in that touch. 

"That could have come in handy with the Wendigos." Lina growled, her eyes narrowing. 

"You...Why did you just use plurals?" 

Martin's edge of nerves was well-deserved, "The hunt before this one, we ended up in Ramsey, Ontario--with two Wendigos drawn to the same area and driven out of their natural hunting patterns because of the mining run-off." 

If it were possible, Martin would have paled. 

"The hunters that tracked you here, they caught the scent back there." Martin rumbled, shaking his head. 

"They used to belong to the Chace family of hunters." Hunter sighed, "We've been on their radar for a lot longer than that." 

"Used to?" 

"The tattoo was purposefully maimed." Lina tensed, knowing that Hunter had to have gotten much closer to the men than she would have liked if he'd gotten a good look at the insides of their upper arms. "Dishonourably discharged, to use their preferred parlance." 

Lina knew her expression had turned thunderous; the very mention of the Chace "family", and Hunter's familiarity with them, bringing an ire up within her that could have melted diamonds. On the inside of Hunter's left upper-arm, there was a brand of the Chace family seal--a mark that had been burned into every member of Hunter's unit, as a test of loyalty to their commanding officer, Viktor Chace himself. 

The legend that surrounded the unit Hunter had been drafted into was much of what Lina had managed to glean of Hunter's war history: a unit completely comprised of magical creatures or magic-users, that the powers on-high had saddled with the patriarch of the oldest supernatural-hunting family known. Viktor had garnered a reputation for derangement and brutality long before he'd been made a general of the very things he and his ilk were famous for slaughtering with impunity. Hunter had defaced the mark on his arm himself, before the war had ended: the over-wrought shield of their coat of arms, containing an ourobos, a brace of intersecting arrows, a wolfsbane flower, and a cross almost entirely obscured by the overlay of a feather, similarly burned into Hunter's skin. 

How Hunter had made that mark, Lina didn't know: didn't really want to. There were many scars that Hunter had that Lina would never want to question. 

"Where are you two headed next?" Martin asked finally, looking between them with the barest hint of a smile. 

"Home, for a while, I thi--" Hunter was cut off mid-word as the doors to the grand hall were thrown almost off their hinges, and screaming began. 

Lina's knives were produced from the glittering folds of embellishment on her hips; the weight of the glittering, black beads and jewels comforting for the gravity of them. 

Beside her, Hunter calmly sipped his drink, unmoved by the unfurling chaos. 

The slavering, giant dog that had burst into the room was like magma poured into the mould of a canine, its white teeth dripping saliva that hissed and sizzled against the marble that cracked beneath the talons of the creature. 

Lina caught herself, doing a double-take, and Hunter let out a low, long whistle, and the attention of the hellhound snapped from the vampires that had fallen into place as a shield wall before the humans, to Hunter still casually sitting across from Martin, who didn't look much troubled at all, either. "Heel." Hunter ordered, a strange, ringing boom threaded through the simple order that made it seem bellowed despite the volume behind it being no more than conversational. The hound flinched, letting out a soft whine, and then its magma-like skin glowing brighter for a moment before the body it made up began twisting and shrinking. 

"Hunter," A rich voice greeted from the destroyed door, "I was hoping it would be you I'd reach." 

The hellhound let out a small whine that was only vaguely edged in the din of screaming souls, its massive form shrinking down until all that stood in the craters left by the hellhound's massive paws was a corgi. 

"Persephone, to what do I owe the pleasure?" Hunter greeted warmly, slinging himself to his feet at last, beaming at the tall, impossibly beautiful woman waiting to receive him. 

Persephone was beautiful in a way that made one's mortal soul flinch simply to look at her: her dark skin glowing as if lit from within with the same fires of hell her hellhounds were forged by, and her regal air unquestionable. Her gown was pitch-black, the flowers beaded onto it glittering as if the gown itself were in motion around her, even as she held her place at the door. The sleeveless nature of the gown displayed the twisted and winding miasma of flowers and vines inked over her arms and shoulders, orchids mingled with anemone. 

Hunter's gaze raked over her displayed tattoos, his mouth turning decidedly down, "What on earth could be threatening your kingdom?" 

At this question, Persephone seemed to be drawn even straighter by an invisible string within her, her chin lifting as her leaf-green eyes filled with sadness until they had dimmed to evergreen. Martin moved as the silence stretched for a beat, moving to the bar in order to loudly pour four more glasses and tucking an extra bottle under each arm before nodding towards the couches he and Hunter had only just vacated. "Shall we?" 

Persephone's relief was almost palpable as she quirked a sharp-toothed smile at Martin, the nod of her acquiescence leaving a soft tinkling in the air like windchimes as her flower-entwined, crystal crown was brushed by her black curls. "Thank you, Martin." 

Lina stamped down hard on any shock that Martin would know the Queen of the Underworld, moving when Hunter silently guided her back towards their seats. 

The hierarchy of the gods was hardly ever lacking for headache: but the keepers of the Underworld had never been unclear. The core of the arrangement had always been that Hades kept the accounts of the dead, Osiris and Anubis worked with Amut to reconcile the accounts and sort the dead, the untold hordes of Reapers then placing souls where they needed to go--and, over all, acting as both benevolent Queen and the unsuspected Devil, was Persephone. 

Persephone was the only one of the kings and queens of the dead given free reign to walk the earth as she wished, and she was unquestionably both the most ruthless and the most formidable, but to see her willingly away from her darling husband, particularly in October, there was something unquestionably wrong. 

Gratefully accepting her drink, Persephone took a seat gracefully, allowing the corgi to leap up into her lap. "Is there anything else I can get you, Βασίλισσα μου?" 

The Greek for "my queen" startled Lina slightly: Martin had been in Eastern Europe for generations, and the gods alone knew how long Martin had had to learn languages, but there was something in his voice, in his deference to Persephone, that niggled at Lina as if he had been Greek to begin with. 

"No thank you, Martin. But I am very glad to see you." Persephone told him warmly, and Lina could feel the temperature of the room rise ever-so-slightly at her regard. 

"What service may I offer you, Persephone?" Hunter asked as Martin sat, nursing his new drink as the partygoers stuttered and stumbled out of the ballroom without acknowledgement of the conclave. 

Persephone revealed a dimple as she smiled lopsidedly at him, and she took a deep breath and a drink before relaxing back against the cushions, the black of her dress slowly ebbing from the bottom up, leaving a silvery-white array of flowers to make up her dress. "You two have been busy," she noted with a throaty undercurrent of appreciation, tipping her glass in salute, "but we have bigger fish to fry, my young dears." Persephone's voice was like fresh milk and honey, and Lina caught a scent of lemongrass and wildflowers. "What do you know about magic, Miss Hughes?" 

Lina gaped for a moment, her brain going blank for a panic-ridden moment, before the answers snapped back into place, "Magic is a kind of energy, and it follows the laws for energy--" 

"But the magic in the world, while it can't be destroyed, can be...contained. Gathered." Persephone nodded, then pursed her full lips, "Something has been steadily gathering magic for a very long time." 

Martin tensed, going completely still as Persephone met his gaze, "You can't mean..." 

"The souls of those possessing magic have not reached us...If I'm right, it's been a trickle for centuries--and for the last few years, we've received next to none at all." 

Lina felt more than heard Hunter take a slow, shaking breath, "How many years?" Hunter asked, voice low and dangerously steady. 

Persephone met Hunter's eye, nodding rather than replying, and Hunter swallowed dryly, breaking her gaze and avoiding Lina's. 

"I came up here to find you two...and Grams." Persephone mentioned the woman as if she were the only thing Persephone was scared of. "Will you help?" 

"Help you face Grams, or help you find and put a stop to someone gathering the magical equivalent of a super-volcano?" Hunter teased lightly, grinning in a way that didn’t reach his eyes. 

"Both, preferably." Persephone's smile was cloyingly sweet, and Lina shuddered in abject, instinctual terror. 

"If we're right, and it is who you think it is, then the whole world is in trouble...so we're in." Hunter asserted, though the strain of his voice belied any assumption that could be made towards an actual desire to agree. 

"How much have you heard about General Viktor Chace, Lina?" Martin asked softly, leaning into the arm of his seat with an icy set to his features. 

Lina's heart dropped, and she had to consciously loosen her grip on the glass in her hand. "He was the commanding officer of Hunter's division in the war." Lina's voice dripped with the hatred that was clearly written on Martin and Persephone's faces, but beside her, Hunter's gaze was far-off and introspective. "He tried to kill Hunter near the end of the war--and Hunter blew him up." 

Martin gave a small nod, looking purposefully down at his own drink before raising it to take a strengthening draft, "Rumour was that Viktor had been cursed by one of his victims so that he could never rest...I had hoped that that tale was either wrong or just slightly mistaken, but since Persephone has brought this up, I'm inclined to give it credence." 

Lina looked between Persephone and Martin, not quite understanding. "His soul never arrived in the Underworld when Hunter blew him up." Persephone supplied, before taking a deep breath and looking at Lina with eyes that could swallow worlds, "And the witch that cursed him forgot to trap him in the meat suit to which he'd been born." 

The glass rolled from Lina's grip to the floor, shattering on impact as the implication of that hit her. 

The Chace family was the oldest and most brutal supernatural-hunting family in the world--and Viktor had been the worst of the lot. The indiscriminate savagery with which he'd run the family had been a caricature of the worst parts of humanity, come to fruition. 

"You think that this...gathering of magic...is somehow linked to Chace and his curse." 

The nod Lina received in response to her tremulous clarification was something out of her nightmares--but it had to be even more devastating for Hunter. 

The scars the war had left were many and varied on every person who had been touched by the ravaging of it: but Lina had seen first-hand how deeply the scars on Hunter's psyche ran. It was the reason he insisted that they get separate rooms; the impetus for Hunter insuring that in teaching her how to fight, she knew damn well how to fight him, too. And to think that the cause of many of the deepest of Hunter's scars was in the world somewhere...Lina was filled with an impossibly cold, banked rage. The kind of brutal anger that stole the breath and sent the soul feeling it on the most vicious of hunts. 

As if reflecting her mood back to her, Lina watched the art inked into Persephone's arms and across her shoulders slowly morph from flowers and vines to a snake and gatherings of flowers shaped rather like skulls; the scent of life that Persephone had brought to the air with her very presence now tinged with the instinctively repulsive note of poison and venom.

"I would not ask if I thought there was anyone else who would be capable of finding the truth and putting an end to it." Persephone offered, but Lina did not need an olive branch: the rage within her making her bloodthirsty enough that she did not care that they were the best for the job, only that she was being given the chance to slake that lust for retribution. 

Martin handed Lina another drink, sitting back with a small sigh, "I'm rather rusty on my necromancy: you seem to be working under an assumption he's been gathering this much power for a reason--what would you say he intends on using it for?" 

"It's not quite death magic," Persephone allowed with a quirk of her full lips, "but, if I were a murderer trapped bodiless, unable to snare my prey; my goal would be to rebuild myself a body. If he gathers enough magical energy, he can force it to manifest him--and if he has more magic than he needs, he'll come back with a few extra tricks." 

Lina consciously rolled her jaw to loosen the tension gritting her teeth together, and Martin's eyes were drawn to the bar behind her as she did, the electric lights there flickering slightly as her power scratched at the cage of her skin, begging to be let out as her ire steadily rose. 

Hunter's gaze had remained on the hellhound lounging in Persephone's lap; the niggling grit of his silence in the finer workings of her mind at last grinding her own reactions to a halt so that she could focus on his. 

"Grams may insist on leaving the Sanctuary to come with us." Hunter spoke at last, his voice rough. He blinked very deliberately before turning his gaze to Persephone instead of the corgi on her lap, "In fact, I know she will." 

Lina twitched slightly: She and Olivia Owens had never actually met face-to-face, though they'd been under Grams' guidance and care for as long as they'd been chasing the supernatural. Lina knew that Grams was a force to be reckoned with, but the idea of having an old woman potentially slowing them down was not one Lina would be given to thinking Hunter would entertain, even in the beloved Grams. 

"I can take over the Sanctuary while she's away." Martin volunteered easily, "I may not have her talent for healing, but I can certainly curtail _any_ threat that crops up." 

The Sanctuary was an offer of solace to both the magical and the non-magical that stood on the boundaries of magic: Over the years, Grams had hosted the fae children whose parents had fought in the civil war that had seen Lina burdened with her magic--the children from either side of the conflict, kept safe because if there was a threat against the sanctity of the Sanctuary, Grams was something of a boogey-man that posed more threat than any other consequence that ever came to mind. 

"Probably best if you were to leave after we do," Hunter told Martin with the barest hint of the smirk, "Grams does so hate to be predictable, after all." 

Martin laughed as if it was a shared joke, and Lina had to wonder what had happened when her partner had first met the vampire. "Particularly when you're the one doing the predicting."


	2. Chapter 2

Persephone knew damn well that Martin and Hunter could see the ghost trailing Lina Hughes just as clearly as she could: it came with a certain proximity to Death, after all. 

As she closed the door to the bedroom Martin was kind enough to provide for her, Persephone felt the prickle of sensation on the back of her neck that meant that rather than following Lina to the rooms in which she and Hunter were staying, the phantasm had followed Persephone to privacy. 

"Hello, Cora." Persephone greeted, voice like smoke as she managed a smile for the ghostly woman. 

_"Hello, Persephone."_ Cora Ó Faolían replied with a smile of her own. 

"If it makes you feel any better at all, I did hear that your father's rather disfigured himself playing with the toys the mortals have made for him." 

_"Mustard gas?"_

Persephone just smiled, and Cora laughed, the sound bringing Persephone right back to when she and the dead woman had sat and watched the world grow into itself. 

_"I'm afraid it doesn't really make me feel any better, Perse. I've been trapped as a spook for so long that even the thought of Ares singeing his eyebrows off on a landmine doesn't give me a warm-fuzzy anymore."_

Persephone nodded her understanding, knowing precisely what it was like to be trapped. "What has you trapped, darling?" 

Cora's lips thinned in a familiar way, and Persephone knew immediately that it had something to do with the "gift" she'd been cursed with by her good-for-nothing father, _"Trystin."_

The name sent a chill through Persephone: Cora's half-brother so deeply intertwined in the story of her life and her death that, for a long while, Persephone had blamed him, instead of placing her ire where it truly belonged. "You had a premonition about him." Persephone murmured, "Did you know that you would be killed to bring him out of hiding?" 

Cora's curse, that she could see the future, but could not tell anyone enough to meaningfully change it, had effected her in ways that Persephone knew no one would be able to fully comprehend, try as she might. Even asking yes and no questions, there was a limit to how much Cora could say about what she had seen--and that the curse Ares had placed on her gift when Cora had refused to use her gift to benefit him had carried into her death was something Persephone rather wanted to wring his neck for. 

Cora nodded, near-black eyes translucent, but somehow still seeming to grow wet. "You went to your death anyway." 

_"My death would have found me if I had been protected with them, or on my own as I was. I had the choice to either die alone, or watch my family be murdered before me for trying to protect me."_

There were few people who were as suited to being a queen as Persephone had found herself to be: Cora was one of them. Fiercely strong and protective, ruthlessly brilliant, and with just the right amount of bastard in her to make it difficult to know what was bluster and what was true. Persephone had been drawn to this daughter of Ares because she'd been rebellious enough to refuse Ares's gifts, even at the cost of her own happiness and sanity. Now, faced with the set to Cora's ghostly jaw, and the fire sparking in eyes that were not-quite-there, Persephone knew that her instinct towards mayhem and anarchy had led her true just as it had done when Persephone had decided to find her way into the Underworld. 

_"He's still trapped."_ Cora's voice was getting hollow, the pain inherent in those words loosening her grip on the world even as Persephone reached out with her power to keep Cora tethered to the here and now. 

Persephone was so distracted trying to keep Cora from drifting into the space between alive and dead that for a long moment, she missed the implications of what Cora had said. The second it registered, Persephone lost her concentration on keeping Cora there, and like a mirage, Cora vanished. 

After Cora's death, Persephone had been incensed, and in her anger, she'd allowed herself to lose sight of the brother Cora had suffered Ares's wrath for. It was only after the fact, in visiting with Aphrodite and Hephaestus, that Persephone had learned about the fate of Trystin Ó Faolían, the son of Ares and the Morrigan, the half-brother of Cora Ó Faolían, god of wolves, and protector of peace. 

As the story went, when Trystin had been born from an ill-advised dalliance between the two gods of war, Ares had seen the progeny as potentially the greatest weapon that could ever have been created. 

Ares had raised Trystin in tight isolation, on cruelty and viciousness that would have broken even the strongest of souls. Trystin had been honed to be precisely what his father wanted. And when Cora had found out about her half-brother, she'd kidnapped him like a thief in the night. 

Trystin was not a "true god", not beholden to any Parthenon, and not believed in enough to be granted the full power a god ought to have access to, but being born of two opposing gods had made him impossibly strong. Persephone had thought that that strength was the limit of the gifts that would be granted him. But to hear Cora say that he was still trapped made Persephone reconsider whether immortality would also have proved to be a result of his birth. 

The notion knocked Persephone’s breath out of her at the torture that Trystin would have been fated to were that the truth. Sitting heavily, Persephone found her fingers wrapping around the ornate handle of her looking glass, the glass rippling even as she raised it. 

The view of the empty bedroom was not surprising, but Persephone would admit to a measure of disappointment. Hades hated sleeping without her, though he ought to have had enough practice to have been used to it. “Hades!” Persephone shouted, and fought valiantly against her amused smile as she listened to scrabbling quickly followed by a crash. She adored Hades more than she could properly say, but he was not the graceful sort. 

_“Darling?”_ Hades’s voice sounded heartbreakingly hopeful, and as soon as he tripped far enough into the room to catch sight of her full-length mirror, he beamed with joy at simply seeing her. And the mortals wondered why she’d imbibed of the pomegranate seeds. 

“Hello, love. I have found Hunter and Lina; tomorrow, we start our journey for the Sanctuary.” 

Hades’s green eyes narrowed slightly, and his thin mouth tucked in on a corner, _“Tell me.”_ He beckoned simply, and Persephone very nearly laughed. 

Sighing, Persephone drew her four-legged companion to her, quite content with the infernal lapdog. “Cora has been haunting Lina Hughes.” 

_“Cora…”_

“Ó Faolían,” Persephone filled in the blank that had Hades’s sharp brows raising over the vague confusion of a name half-remembered. 

Understanding washed over Hades’s sharp, handsome features, quickly followed by concern. 

“She says that her brother is still trapped in whatever prison the mortals threw him in.” 

_“Most godlings are imbued with a power, but not immortality, you know as well as I.”_

“I know that it’s a lot to ask, but…is there a way you can look?” 

Hades was the keeper of the dead: recording the lives and deaths of each soul that passed into the Underworld, and overseeing the reapers’ system for finding the right person the right afterlife. The records were impossibly vast, and though Persephone had no doubt Hades would be able to find it, she also loathed asking. Hades winced, and Persephone felt worse. _“He would have died, had he died, before we consolidated. He’s half-Greek, but he’s half-Gaelic, too. He might have been processed through us, or…”_

Persephone winced wider than her husband, nearly snarling. The afterlife had been disparate and chock-full of strife before she had…campaigned the other gods of death into consolidating under her and Hades’ banner. The records for most other lives and deaths were limited at best, and ill-organized at minimum. “He died in Greece…?” 

_“From what I remember, he and Cora lived in what’s now Ireland.”_ Hades reminded gently. Persephone was well-aware that where you died, even if you’d had ties to it, did not dictate your afterlife. _“I’ll look, of course. But if there is anything to find about his death—if he died, then it may take me years to find it.”_

Persephone nodded, “Thank you, love.” 

Hades looked at her with such devotion that Persephone felt herself warm like the sun in spring, after an interminably long winter. _“Anything for you, always.”_

The yearly separation was difficult enough for Persephone, asking her to undertake this mission had very nearly been too much for her. 

_“Tell me about the world.”_ Hades urged, with the same gentle, enthusiastic curiosity that came with that question every time they were apart. It was an old trick to take her mind off things, but it was no less of a help. 

“Well, as we speak, I’m in the middle of a mansion full of vampires,” Persephone whispered conspiratorially, smiling at the overwrought expression of scandalization Hades plastered on. “It’s bloody cold out, I will admit. I can see why the mortals had trouble during our honeymoon.” 

_“And you’re headed to even colder climes.”_

Persephone hissed dramatically, and they shared a chuckle. The Underworld was largely cold, though Persephone brought with her a warmth that seeped into the cracks of even the obsidian halls of the main palace. “Hunter is strong, and Lina is stronger…I worry still.” 

Kindness made Hades’s green eyes into leaves interlaced with sunlight like a lover’s fingers, _“I know you do, my love. If I would have thought any of our compatriots could have gotten this done as thoroughly as you, I could not have told you to go.”_

“Lay down. I’ll tell you tall tales of this world until you fall asleep.” Persephone urged, burying the fingers of her free hand in the fur of the hellhound she’d chosen to come with her. 

With an indulgent smile, Hades angled the mirror in their bedroom so that he would be able to see her from the bed, and obediently climbed in. Persephone knew from that alone that he would not have eaten that day, choosing to work himself to the bone instead of indulge in the care and comfort that Persephone normally forced him to partake in. 

Hades did not need sleep, nor food, nor drink to continue; but when Persephone had first found her passage to the Underworld, she had found the handsome god of the dead more skeletal than any creature she’d ever met before, using the godly gift of Glamour to make himself appear more like the healthier mortals he saw enter the Underworld, though never going so far as to make himself look quite like the other gods. 

Hades had not been the kind to particularly care about much beyond his duty, until he’d met her. Being the goddess of spring; a proponent of life, she had made it something of a mission to show him the delights of worldly indulgences. His garden in the Underworld had been lush in a way that had stunned Persephone to the extreme; verdant and rich with fruit, the trick of its growth taught to him by the Gaelic Fae, giving it the same temptations of their roving feasts, and the ability for any who partook from it to move freely between the Underworld and the land of the living. Over the ages, upon every godly gathering, Persephone and Hades had grown to know each other better than anyone else had ever known either of them. It was when Persephone had noticed a difficulty beckoning flowers to bloom that an inkling of the depth of her feelings first came to her. 

Persephone had never been one to dither: life did not know how to weigh the pros and cons of its continuance, so she did not bother with worrying over making the decisions, only with the concerns that came hand-in-hand with their consequences. She had found a way into the Underworld when Zeus had refused to allow his brother safe passage to meet with her to explore deeper whether her feelings were or could be returned. The repercussions of her flight from the land of the living hadn’t even occurred to her until it had been Hades to come to her, worried for the massacre Demeter had been wreaking in her daughter’s absence. Where she had dismissed Zeus from Hades’s doorstep with all the wrath she could summon, she ultimately could deny Hades nothing. The lie of the tethering properties of the pomegranate seeds had been for her own gain, and used to the nth degree. It was a story that the fae’s flings adopted when given the choice to join their Between-Place or live boring, mortal lives. 

She did feel bad that the mortals had twisted their story to one of abduction and forced-marriage, but Hades cared not at all for the beliefs of mortals so long as she did love him. 

“I have little desire to see my mother, I must admit. It’s a delay we can’t afford if we’re right about our quarry.” Hades was chuckling at that, even as he flashed her a mildly disapproving look. 

Demeter had never actually approved of Persephone’s choice of husband, but nor could she really raise much fuss once it was made perfectly clear that Persephone had made her choice. Persephone knew that in large part it was the stigma of Hades’s reputation as the god of death, conflated with the general agreement among the gods that he was something of a workaholic—which meant the general opinion was that he was a bore, though Demeter, who had eschewed most of the godly gatherings since Persephone was born, took it to mean that he was more dangerous than he was boring. Demeter was jealous of every moment she was given with her daughter, and Hades seemed to understand that in a way that even Persephone had trouble grasping. 

“I’ll…check in, but I can’t dally..." 

_"And should she want to join you?"_ Hades pressed, his kindness grating slightly on his wife. 

Persephone sucked in a long, deep breath, and releasing it sounded much like the snake running up and down her arms, peeking out between the bouquets of jasmine and lilies currently in bloom along with the serpent. It was an old argument between them, Persephone's disdain for her mother's usual disregard for mortal life. That Demeter's response to her daughter's concern was abject disgust, had complicated matters between mother and daughter even further. Hades, while agreeing with Persephone that disgust was not what one wanted to see in a parent's views for the passions of their child, also insisted on reminding Persephone that Demeter was of the land, and that mortals had been hurting the land, in one way or another, for longer than Demeter had even been a goddess of growth. 

_"You are a queen, not a child to hold petty disputes. If Demeter wishes to go with you, and she offers assistance..."_

"Then I'll accept. But if she wants to come with simply to slow us down--" 

Hades sighed, and Persephone's lips perked into a tiny smirk at the sound. 

"I am a queen. And as a queen, I know the value of undertaking a task like this as quickly and efficiently as possible. I will show no mercy to anything that tries to unduly delay us." 

_"Your mother may not like that you have found a love of mortals in choosing me, my love, but she at least supports it, in her way. She could have continued her massacre after you'd made your choice."_

"You mean like goading Poseidon into a tidal wave, and convincing the Titans to try to revolt in order to burst Vesuvius?" 

_"You don't know that she did either of those things, my love--"_

"What about the Irish famine as soon as we convinced the other Underworlds to merge with ours?" 

Hades winced at that one, knowing that that one was likely Demeter's doing, even if it was in a territory not usually her own. Persephone had been made to be Demeter's princess, and watching her grow into her own as a queen had been difficult for the doting mother. 

"I know that you try to be kind to her, as you are to all, but I have trouble expecting the best in someone who's proven themselves to be incapable of trying to meet an expectation of mere adequacy." 

_"Harsh words from a woman who adores the woman she's talking of, dear."_

"I love her, but it doesn't mean that I like or forgive her." Persephone qualified with a flick of her hair so that the mess of curls tumbled over one shoulder. 

_"She tries--"_

"She _is_ **trying** ," Persephone emphasized, the jasmine beginning to look more like the skulls they hid, and the lilies morphing into the harder stars of deadly nightshade. 

Hades, as if able to read her tattoos despite seeing only her face, stopped, shaking his head slightly, but relenting. 

"I don't want to go over this. I'd rather we fall asleep together." Persephone said at last, and there was nothing that could stop her smile as Hades beamed at her from their bed. 

_"I love you. I miss you."_

"I wish I were at home." Persephone pouted. 

The decadence of the bedclothes and décor of the vampires’ bedroom was little compared to her own bedroom in the Underworld, but Martin and the vampires proved themselves to be extremely accommodating hosts, because as she laid down, Persephone caught the smell of home on the sheets: juniper and linen, with the slightest bit of the tang of good soil. 

Academically, Persephone knew it was due to a piece of spell-work laid into a hex bag tucked beneath the mattress at the foot of the bed, but the comfort it provided was nothing to scoff at. Idly wondering if Martin would allow her to take the hex bag with her, Persephone allowed the scent of home and the sight of her husband, even separated by their mirrors, to lighten the burden of stress from her shoulders, until she'd drifted away. 

_In her dreams, Persephone was standing in the grand hall of her palace, the black stone rising in arches high above decorated with the herald creatures of each of the gods of death. From her arms, Persephone's snake slithered to land heavily on the ground, his yellow-green scales fading to black as he slithered away from the light Persephone produced. Persephone had never allowed her snake to leave her skin in human company; inland taipans were not to be allowed in mixed company, Persephone had always believed._

_Persephone knew, though she wasn't sure how she did, that she was alone in the palace: something next to impossible, with the sheer number of gods that called it home._

_On the air, none of her flowers could be detected--only the muffling scent of dust, and beneath, the acrid burn of metal and rock so hot that it was truly melting. As Persephone inhaled again, turning in place to search for how this could be, her breath caught in her throat, choking her in place. It was as though it was no mere catch of air as her lungs stuttered and gasped, the cough causing her to writhe before she crumpled to the ground beneath the force of them._

_There was something wrong._

_Persephone clawed at her throat, catching tiny glimpses of enough air to keep her from passing out, though nowhere near enough to keep her vision from being beset by stars and points of darkness._

_She knew this feeling._

_For all her gasping, Persephone could not make a sound to call out for aid, even if there was anyone there to aid her. On the floor of the home that had comforted and welcomed her for millennia, the Queen of the Dead would face her death._

_She had died like this, exactly like this, once before._

Persephone burst awake with a shattering cry, Hades's yells to get her to wake cutting off as the glass of the mirror broke, and her snake rearing back to bite the very mortal that Hunter and Lina had come to Budapest to save, even as the hellhound she'd brought with her growled a threat to protect the boy. 

"Kifo, no!" Persephone barked out of a throat that felt as though she had been being strangled in her sleep. Despite the presence of the mortal, she knew that she hadn't, and though she was infernally enraged at the shattering of her mirror and the resultant disconnection it would cause with Hades, she was not so full of ire that she would allow her pet to strike down an innocent. 

The snake obediently coiled back, hissing mightily as he did and regarding the teenager with more venom in his gaze than could be found in his bite. The dog, still in the shape of a corgi, slowly lowered his belly to the ground, watching the snake warily from Hellfire-red eyes. 

Pulling in heaving lungfuls of air, Persephone turned her wickedly green gaze from her pet to her intruder, cocking a sharp eyebrow and swallowing around the pain to make sure her voice was steady when she asked, "And what are you doing here?" 

"Y-You were screaming, my lady," the child replied, performing a dance that told Persephone he didn't know whether to drop to his knees in supplication so close to a venomous snake, bow, or remain upright against the instinctual urge to beg for her mercy. 

Persephone licked her lips slowly, "And was it words I was screaming?" 

"I...I'm not sure, ma'am." The boy's head lowered. "You...may have been speaking, but it is not a language I know." 

Persephone took a deep breath, and nodded, shifting on the bed and reaching her arm down for Kifo to slide back into her skin, the coolness of the snake telling her that he'd been loose for longer than she could be comfortable with, though she had no doubt in his loyalty. 

"When...when I came in, your snake, the...dog... and-and the man in the mirror were trying to wake you. The vampires are all asleep, it's after sunrise, or I-I never would have trespassed, please--" 

"You're forgiven." Persephone told him with the same ring of authority in her voice that had earned her the title of the Iron Queen. The boy almost dropped to his knees again, but Persephone found she wasn't interested in the supplications of mortals, in favour of assessing the damage to her mirror. 

The glass had been forged with the water and sand of the river Styx, and a bolt of lightning provided by Zeus himself, to beg Persephone's forgiveness when he'd overstepped his bounds last, and had forced Hades into having to clean it up. The Black Death had been gruesome for all the gods of the dead, and when Persephone had learned that it was a machination of Hera's to get back, once again, at her cheating scum of a husband, Persephone had stormed Olympus, Cerberus at her heels, to demand a retribution of her time with Hades, wasted. That schooling Zeus in front of his sycophants had proven to be better revenge than a third of Europe dead, Persephone had not pointed out to Hera, but she'd bloody hoped the goddess of marriage had gotten the damn message. 

There was no fixing it that Persephone could discern; and it wasn't likely, after Zeus had been schooled one too many times by her into refraining from causing trouble for his brother, that there was much chance of it to ever be replaced. 

"What time is it?" Persephone asked the boy after a long minute spent examining the shards of glass, still contained in the frame of the mirror. 

"Just noon, ma'am." 

Nodding more to herself than the teenager, Persephone shifted in bed, groaning slightly at the unaccustomed pain in her throat and chest. She shifted to the side of the bed away from the boy and rose, her nightgown nothing of note by her standards, but she knew mortals were fickle about acceptable attire on the female form. "Has there been any word from Hunter and Lina for me?" 

"No, ma'am." 

Nodding again, Persephone looked at the boy over her shoulder, "You may go. Thank you for trying to wake me and for checking to make sure I wasn't in peril." 

Colour flooded the cheeks and ears of the teenager, and he did a strange cross between a curtsey, a bow, and a head bob before he scarpered. 

Persephone sighed slowly, taking idle note of the sense of luxury that taking a full breath afforded her as the memory of asphyxiation swam around her like a hood of storm clouds. Persephone crossed to the vanity mirror, dropping into the seat with perhaps more relief for her sore body than she was ever used to feeling. Her neck bore no marks of hands; the shattered reflection had been right about that. 

Her reflection told her that rallying was in order, but Persephone wasn't sure she was capable, at that juncture, of rallying. She felt more like a scared little girl than she did the Iron Queen; and it frightened her to her core. 

She did not quite remember being a child, though from the stories, unlike gods born in more troubled times, she would have had the time to be. The memory that that dream stirred felt…old. 

Zeus, even though he had been born during a crisis of the gods, had had a childhood, Persephone knew, and, as with everything their interminable lives had been through, Zeus remembered being a child. Persephone had never asked Hades about his youth: he'd been the firstborn, and the first eaten by Kronos, according to the mortals' stories. Whether those stories were right or not, Persephone did not want to dwell on. 

Artemis, however, had been born a god, but because her mother had needed help, Artemis had gone from wailing newborn to full-grown woman in moments, to aid in the birth of her brother. 

It was a tricky business, to be a god. To lose your followers was to lose your power, slowly having it ebb to nearly nothing as another rose in your place; to have your story change fundamentally could cause many gods to go mad--the split between the New Testament and Old Testament Christian god had been enough to drive the poor thing into a mania that the world over was still suffering through, and Persephone hoped, for the sake of the god as much as the mortals subject to the godly will, that favour turned sooner rather than later, and the split could begin to mend. 

Persephone dressed quickly, yearning for the fresh fruit that Hades had a habit of bringing her in bed, always dark and rich and perfectly ripe. She packed what few things she had brought out for the night, before hesitating over the shattered mirror. Her distorted reflection became an ache in her heart, and the yearning grew to a banked rage that was born of frustration for having to give up time with her beloved because sacrificing time with her mother would end...poorly. 

Persephone stuffed the useless mirror into her bag despite her logical arguments for disposing of the extra weight, and flung her door open. 

Leaning casually against the opposite wall with an apple in-hand, Hunter quirked his lips in the memory of a smile before tossing her the fruit, "Hello." 

Persephone caught the fruit, feeling a kind of whiplash as her emotions went from the roiling turmoil of sadness and anger to an amusement which she suspected Hunter was somehow influencing her towards feeling. "Hello, Hunter." 

As she took a bite out of the apple, Hunter ducked forward and picked up her bag, all the while exuding a sense that he knew she was determined to pull her own weight on this adventure, while simultaneously telling her that, for this part, she needn't bother worrying over it. "I won't ask if you slept well, since I could sense your magic from three blocks away." 

Persephone wrinkled her nose, "Sorry about that." 

Hunter shook his head, but he was smiling as the hellhound nipped at his heels, excited to see him as much as he was excited to be out of the bedroom, "I'm not unfamiliar with nightmares." 

Frowning as she followed him downstairs to the bustle of the children of the orphanage, Persephone let herself admire what it was that the vampires were doing, if only a little. It was clever, to ingratiate themselves to a community in the way they were doing it. Many of their young charges were climbing social ladders in a way that allowed for permanence to their operation: Orphans raised by the vampires' orphanage in seats of power gave these vampires a measure of protection that no other coven would ever manage to glean. 

"Jonathan," Hunter called to the teenager he and Lina had saved, producing a heavy silver ring from his pocket and flipping it like a coin towards the boy, who caught it automatically, "Sylna wanted me to pass that along, with her regards." 

Jonathan blushed from the roots of his hair down, and Persephone concluded that Sylna was likely one of the succubi that had swept him up--but as the boy looked down at the ring resting in his palm, his expression hardened and changed, and Hunter hesitated for a moment, sucking in a nearly-imperceptible breath. 

"Did they explain how...how they usually hunt?" The concern in Hunter's voice had Persephone wracking her mind to remember the rules and codes that had been put down by the magical community to ensure that human interference happened as little as possible. 

"I...I was a mistake, because Myka was young and slipped through their wards during his heat," Jonathan recited, "they normally choose and drain...those who would do others harm for their pleasure." 

Hunter nodded, setting down Persephone's trunk to reach a hand to touch Jonathan's arm, "Martin mentioned to Lady Hughes that you were older than most, when you first came here--that you remembered your parents." 

As if a shift on the wind brought a hint of smoke to the air, Persephone was hit with the realization of fire: the succubi of Budapest preyed on those who wanted blood and violence and pain, and took it without any concern for consent--and one of Jonathan's parents, by the size of the ring likely his father, had been one of those, and had been consumed by the succubi for it. 

"Sylna told me to tell you that she scarcely can remember a better young man, and to commend you both for how you handled yourself during this, and that you managed to talk Myka into bringing you and he back to them. They may not have gotten him back if you hadn't." Persephone sipped in a breath as Jonathan's entire demeanour changed once more, the hair on the back of her neck standing on-end as if a power far greater than her own had brushed along the surface of Hunter's skin; the combination of Hunter's hand on the boy's elbow and the depth of his brown eyes sealing the magic into place. 

"You are very brave," Persephone agreed, just loudly enough for the peers that had begun whispering around them could hear her praise. Persephone knew, in an abstract way, that she held herself, always like a queen, and the attribute had never proven itself to be anything but useful. "Simply coming to check on me was something most gods wouldn't have dare to do." 

Jonathan coloured even deeper, and Hunter gave a slow smile. 

As Hunter and Persephone made motions to begin making their exit, Jonathan's shoulders went rigid, his hand flying up as if to stay a running horse, "Wait, just...I'll be right back." 

Persephone and Hunter looked at each other as Jonathan took off up the stairs they had just come down, their heads tilting in unison to better listen to heavy clomp of teenaged boy running through an upper floor. 

It was not long before Jonathan came very close to tumbling down the stairs to get back to them, a small satin bag clutched in his fist. 

"T-Take that." Jonathan panted, thrusting the bag at Persephone, "It's the...the spell-bag that makes a space smell like home, whatever home is to you. You broke your--you broke your mirror, take this." 

Persephone's chest tightened as she reached for it, the flowers of her tattoos bursting with colourful life over her skin, filling the air around her with the scent of blooms as she beamed, touched by the consideration. 

"Thank you, Jonathan." It was her turn to let her powers brush too close to the surface, though she wasn't quite sure how Hunter's powers had managed to feel so...vast. Persephone was...prickly, she knew, but what good was a rose without the thorns to protect it? She didn't often give blessings, because it wasn't often she was impressed enough to bother. Jonathan's eyes widened as if he was realizing just what he had caused. Persephone's estimation of Martin's competency in what they were teaching those children rose further, if Jonathan knew enough about her to be in true awe of being given a gift from the goddess of the dead. 

"Sa--Safe travels." Jonathan tripped over his tongue, the rabbit-like fear in his eyes unnecessary as he looked between Hunter and Persephone, but appreciated. 

"Thank you." Hunter murmured kindly, taking Persephone's arm and drawing her into the grey slant of the afternoon. "Just out of curiosity...?" 

"He'll always be provided for, in one way or another," Hunter didn't flinch, though any other mortal would have in the face of her smile and the inherent tinge of her words. 

"Quite the gift." Hunter commended, hauling her trunk up on top of a motorcar idling before the vampire's mansion, a human-shaped bundle in the backseat that Persephone had to assume was Lina wrapped almost head to toe in silk pashminas and a woolen blanket. The heavy thunder of a snore from the backseat was cut-off midway as Hunter thumped the trunk onto the top of two others, strapping it efficiently in place. A muffled string of guttural consonants that Persephone dimly remembered were curses in Russian came before Lina wriggled on the leather seat, flopping further over onto her side and curling her knees closer to her chest before her breathing deepened again. 

"Mmm, much like the gift of closure, and a life lived free of the shackle of possibility?" Persephone raised her brows at Hunter as he crossed to open her door for her, helping her very primly into her seat in the passenger side. 

"Well, he is not likely to become the beast his father was, but paranoia does make for a life half-lived when you're paranoid that you're bound to re-make someone else's mistakes." 

Persephone narrowed her eyes at the young man, her lips twisting into a grudging smile as she asked, "Did the succubi have his father's ring? Really?" 

Impish brown eyes that gave nothing but amusement away turned on her as the motor revved, traffic just at that moment barring them from pulling back into the flow of it and out of the loving embrace of the fanged undead. 

It took Persephone longer than it should have, as they drove towards the train station, to figure out just _why_ Lina Hughes was passed out cold in the backseat of their motor. It was subtle, but powerful: Hunter was effecting the...for lack of a better term, the _mood_ of everyone in the car. It was a very subtle shift, but one powerful enough to have even her edging towards lethargy. And to control the emotions of those around him strongly enough to effect her was some very powerful magic. 

"She's never met Grams." Hunter murmured quietly when Persephone's gaze narrowed enough that he knew she'd been tipped off. 

"So why are you bothering to muffle her nerves? She doesn't know, yet, just how nervous she should truly be." 

Hunter's mouth quirked up on one side, "Lina has very volatile magic: nervousness in her tends cause every piece of machinery nearby to work itself to a point of...rather spectacular destruction." 

Persephone's brows lifted high, her lips pursing slightly, "I've never heard of...that kind of effect." 

Hunter's smirk widened slightly, and he threw a glance over his shoulder to look at the beauty safely asleep in the back seat, "Lina was given her powers in the middle of a warzone, by a king of the Fae who chose to sacrifice his life for hers. I don't know that her particular kind of power has ever existed before." 

Persephone tilted her head to the side, resisting the urge to twist in her seat to look at Lina herself, "I had heard about that. I didn't know what to think. A human absorbing the powers of the High King...and remaining human? It's never been heard of."

"She's as human as I am." Hunter muttered, just cryptically enough that Persephone had to resist the urge to tear him apart in order to study how the pieces fit together. 

They arrived to a conclave of uniformed men waiting to whisk their luggage to their private train car, Hunter's easy manner having the men helping them in roaring laughter as he told them a ridiculous (and likely true) tale of the infamous exploits of the Hughes heiress, as seen from her "aide". 

There was no comment as the hellhound bounded just a few paces before them, straight for the car that would be theirs, excited to get there and have Lina ensconced once more so that he could take back residence of her lap. 

Academically, Persephone knew that Hunter and Lina were something of a legend in and of themselves to the mortals. But to witness a story being told, then very nearly see that story being slanted within the minds of the people hearing it, was something else entirely. It was like an illusionist's trick: Hunter, with a flourish worthy of a master, wove together both their sordid tale of political intrigue (only lightly passing over the minor details of the political factions consisting of a coven of vampires and a host of succubi), while Lina was quietly and discreetly set into their train car, Persephone taking place beside her while Hunter spread the stories of their power thinly masked by their altruism. As the story would spread, it would be made all the more fantastical, Persephone knew; but for all the rumour it would spread amongst the humans, the reputation garnered by Hunter and Lina of being fair, honest, and trustworthy would also shine through to those who were in the know that the fantastical was not as far-fetched as it was dismissed as. 

Just before the train was due to pull out from the station, Hunter swung himself into the seat next to Lina, the façade of bright young thing falling away from his face for the reserved, analytical truth beneath. 

"Time for some food, ceann cróga." Hunter hummed softly to the sleepy-eyed Lina as she blinked slowly at their surroundings. 

Persephone had not noticed as their train car had been stocked with a full breakfast, and she was in something akin to awe as she watched Hunter deftly handle the jostle of the train car as it burst into motion, even in the middle of pouring a cup of coffee. 

"You call her "brave one"," Persephone noted, accepting the cup of coffee when Hunter handed it to her, already decked with a dollop of cream as she preferred it. 

"She's one of the bravest people I've ever known." Hunter replied tightly, scooping an arm around Lina's shoulders and helping her to shift away the wrappings of her blankets like a mummy being reborn. Lina scowled without really opening her eyes, lips pouted until Hunter pressed a cup into her hand. It wasn’t coffee in Lina’s cup, Persephone noted, but a thick, dark chocolate, leavened with cinnamon and a dash of chilli powder. It wasn’t a concoction to stir full wakefulness, but Persephone knew that chocolate of that kind would do wonders on its own to bring a flush of warmth to the coldest of hearts. 

It was a strange fascination for Persephone, to watch the two young powerhouses of legend in the truth of their humanity. It was a clever deception, for the two of them to encourage Hunter's human reputation of approachability to spread its fingers into the reputation garnered by the creatures they helped, and Persephone would have had a hard time peeling the truth from the fiction of his harmlessness if it weren't for the stories told by the dead that had crossed by his hand. 

The question of when they were expected to arrive was stolen from Persephone's lips as they an impact shook the train on its rails; the rolling growl of Persephone's chosen infernal guardian prickling Kifo against her skin. 

Turning from a searching glance out of the window, Persephone's breath caught in her throat at the change in Hunter; his eyes fully glowing with power and his skin pale on his bones as a crushing cold gust blew through the train like a whisper of dissention through a gathered crowd. Persephone was familiar with the sensation, and for a precarious moment, her shock at encountering it here was almost enough to cost them the entire game. 

It was the sensation of the Reapers, come to gather mortals for the Underworld--but though she recognized it as such, there was something inherently _wrong_ about the way these reapers felt. Bursting from her seat as Hunter's influence of calm completely abandoned them, Persephone went to the door of the compartment, her ire drawing the hellhound to her heels, his true form flickering to the fore until it wasn't her heels but her hips the dog stood at. 

In the compartment, Persephone could practically feel Hunter stirring Lina to full wakefulness, and as the sickly scent of rotted oranges reached Persephone's nose with another chilling exhale of the Reapers' presence, Persephone felt Hunter's influence change from one of sleepy calm to one of such tightly controlled rage that it nearly stole the breath out of her lungs, even more than the growing sound of a catastrophe building towards them from the trestles of the train bridge they had stalled in the middle of. 

Lina's waking was no small thing: the sheer explosion of power bringing every hair on Persephone's body to absolute attention and changing the taste of the air on her tongue to one of ozone and heat. In Hunter's arms, Lina crackled and sparked with the power she had not been meant to receive, and as her jade-green eyes raked over Persephone, the hellhound, and the train car for an answer to why Hunter had chosen to overload her system with a rage that would have had even Persephone shrinking in fear, the unholy shriek of a machine suddenly and direly overworked crashed through the train as if an answering opposition to the Reapers' cold clutch. 

Persephone was thrown to her seat as the train threw furiously forward, and the hellhound, tail between its legs, whimpered and crawled to lay behind Persephone's feet as though Persephone had a hope of protecting him. 

The train was no longer stalled: the engine roaring furiously as they pushed past whatever had fallen across the tracks to bar their way, heedless of the desperate, panicked clamouring of the train conductor, fireman, and engineer, carrying even to their car over the clamouring machinations of the engine. 

Persephone's attention was drawn to the window once more as the thing that had blocked their path proved to be a part of the bridge, now thrown into the raging Danube below. The trestles shook again, the bridge undoing itself around them, but the engine churned faster: pulling to the safety of stable ground only _just_ as the collapse was announced with an almighty crash of water. 

Just as quickly as Hunter had unleashed the patina of anger, it was erased, and Lina slowly coiled into an exhausted heap against Hunter's side as her powers released their hold on the engine. 

The scent of rotten oranges was like an aftertaste, heavy on the back of Persephone's throat, and she wrinkled her nose at it, reaching for one of the morsels that had been catered for them. 

"You smelled it?" Hunter asked. It was a look of perturbance that replaced suspicion when Persephone gave confirmation, and it piqued Persephone's curiosity once again. 

"Why?" 

"Magic has a scent...a signature, after a fashion, that marks it as belonging to the caster. I can smell them whether the magic is in use or not--but when others can smell it, it means the magic was strong enough to be a concern." 

Wincing, Persephone offered Hunter the other half of the morsel, indicating that he probably needed to get the taste out of his mouth more than she did. 

Hunter quirked an appreciative smile, shaking his head and reaching for the pot of coffee, pouring himself another cup. 

Without the kick of Lina's power, the train had once again stopped, and Persephone cocked her head to listen as the conductors scrabbled to check each occupant, their apologies stuttering and more scared than reassuring. 

"We'll all have to disembark: the engine won't be reparable." Hunter recited under his breath, "And if Lina wakes in the next twenty-four hours, I'll eat my hat." 

The frail cast of Lina's pale, beautiful features was all the more evident with the drain that magic caused mortals when they used it. Persephone's eyes cast over her thin frame, and quashed the instinct, a holdover from Demeter, to tsk over the state of the girl's strength and how much a blow it would take to starve after such an output of power. 

Being evacuated from the train was of little consequence to Persephone, but the mortals beyond their party were a-flutter in the rapidly-cooling mid-afternoon as storm clouds fierce enough to give Zeus a fright roiling in. Accepting the bundle of Lina into her arms, Persephone watched as Hunter kicked open one of Lina's trunks, pulling a sheaf of silk-lined fur from the top and wrapping it around both women. 

"Mister Dyan!" One of the liveried servicemen waved to draw Hunter's attention as he tried to negotiate a path to them through the crush of huddled, frightened people. 

Hunter broke off from them, and Persephone watched as he and the attendant spoke quietly, a sense that, even with her reputation, Lina had been shunted--in the minds of the general public--to the role of fragile flower. 

With Lina's head lolled to her shoulder, Persephone had to make the conscious correction that to think of Lina as anything less than a threat would be a grave misstep. 

In a billow of steam swept towards them, Persephone watched as the image of Cora flickered into focus before her. 

_"I don't know how much longer I'll be able to keep myself from getting pulled into the same trap you've come to untangle everyone from,"_ Cora murmured, her visage even paler than the ghostly pallor that cast in it, as if something were straining the strength of her very soul, _"and the closer you get to it, the harder it will be for me, so you must listen now, Good Lady Death._

_"In the city beneath the city, beyond the Abhainn Nimhithe, you'll find the gates that won't open but for the blood of the huntsman. The monster you hunt wants the power that lies beyond those gates: a bargain that was struck, but cannot be finished. If you save them, then you stop it, once and for all."_

The disjointed struggle for Cora to force her words out was familiar to Persephone: the curse kept her foresight muzzled even in death, and the way it muddled her mind as she spoke of what she knew to be coming was a cruelty Persephone was ready to destroy Ares for inflicting. 

Cora dissolved before her like a plume of smoke unfurling from the end of incense, and Persephone grit her teeth against the urge to grasp for her, to try to catch her with Persephone’s bare hands and hold her there for as long as Persephone’s strength held. Against her shoulder, Lina mumbled in her sleep, brow furrowed as her weight shifted, trying to find a position in which it was safe for her to let her legs crumble out from under her. Persephone was aware that a mortal woman of her stature was not meant to be able to so easily lift and hold a woman even as slight as Lina, but casting a venomous glance around for witnesses, Persephone took what little of Lina’s weight wasn’t already propped against her, picking her up as if she was no larger than the once again-tiny hellhound flopped at their feet and glaring at anyone who even dared to look their way. 

Eyes flashing as he rejoined them, Hunter’s long, clever hand caught at the air above Lina’s head, and the only reason Persephone didn’t startle as her right-hand woman, Melinöe, became a visible presence the second Hunter had touched her arm was down to years of practice. 

Persephone knew, from experience, that to touch Melinöe was to touch the very essence of cold: she was the icy fingers that trailed down one’s spine when ghosts were at their strongest, and her presence was a source of madness to any mortal that came into contact with her. And yet, Hunter withstood not only her presence, but her touch, without the bat of an eyelash, her wrist caught in his hand hovering just above Lina’s temple with the luridly curling black smoke of a nightmare galloping over and around the tips of her ghost-thin fingers. 

“What is the meaning of this?” Persephone demanded, cradling Lina more protectively, and taking a deliberate step away from the baying mare now stopped on the tip of Melinöe’s index finger. 

As if Persephone had blinked, Melinöe had shifted from her gossamer-wrapped self into a prim, secretarial young woman whose visage was like the mundane after-image of Melinöe’s creeping horror. “Miss Hughes is being haunted.” 

With a saccharine smile that flashed teeth that were just too sharp to be dismissed as harmless, Melinöe extricated her wrist from Hunter’s grip, and, pouting, rubbed where he had touched her. 

It didn’t escape Persephone that Hunter struggled for a moment to get his fingers to move again, but of more pressing concern was the nightmare that had vanished when Melinöe had shifted from chasing her target. 

“I’m aware of that,” Persephone grit, “but you should have come to me—“ 

“You’ve been inflicting the nightmares on Lina since we came to Budapest. Why?” Hunter cut in, his voice dropped into a growl that Persephone felt a hellhound would be proud of the threat contained. 

Melinöe looked at Hunter with her luminous, impossibly dark eyes, too wide to be quite human, and her pale, grey-cast skin darkened around her cheeks in the antithesis of a blush, blood red lips curling into a smile more like a predator’s than the coy flirtation she was aiming for, “Oh, sugar, did you miss me?” 

The answering smirk Hunter gave her was chilling enough that Melinöe's flirtation immediately soured, and before Persephone could stop her, she'd disappeared on the wind like a billow of ash. 

"You two have a history." Persephone noted, and Hunter gave her a much less threatening smirk.

"I survived the war, my lady: I doubt there's a soul who could boast that and claim no connection to the goddess of nightmares and ghosts." Hunter gestured Persephone towards the road and the non-descript black car that had pulled up, a liveried driver hopping out to open the door for her and Lina. "Grams is not quite omnipotent, but she might as well be." Hunter murmured at her look of suspicion; all the other occupants of the train now bunched together in clusters to try to provide some solace from the icy whipping wind. 

"I thought you were the one who knew what was going to happen five minutes before it did." 

Hunter smiled, "Now where did you hear that?"


	3. Chapter 3

It was impossible to know how long it’d been. 

Before the darkness and silence had encompassed all, their calendars had been different from what calendars became, and translating the two was of little consequence to the dead. 

When the darkness and silence had been broken in on, and the warrior and his lover had been locked into the darkness to die, there was a hope, however small, that the dead would not be forgotten completely: that their story would live on, and spare them from the true death with its survival. 

It’s said that the dead are never truly dead, so long as they are remembered.


	4. Chapter 4

Lina woke feeling precisely like she’d been rolled down a hill, the slightly gauzy sensation of the inside of her mouth and the pounding of both her head and what she assumed to be her kidneys indicating that she’d overdone one vice or another. It was the deeply unpleasant tingling and numbness of both her hands that told her the thing she’d overdone was her goddamned magic. 

“Those wards you use, they’re not wards built to keep…my parthenon at bay…” Persephone led, as if asking a question, and Lina all at once found herself completely without the gumption to open her eyes; curious and so very exhausted. 

“They’re based in hoodoo. And, as the woman who taught me how to make them and how to use them would tell you, a shade is a shade is a shade, and there is no proper difference in beating them back so long as it works.” 

A rush of wistful nostalgia rose in Lina as Hunter’s voice rolled close to the smooth cadence of the woman he was quoting; the remembered drawl of Mama Tamae’s voice always a little like coming home for Lina, who had been raised primarily by the housekeeper that her mother had sweet-talked into coming to work for the Hughes family while there had been a Hughes family. 

Persephone hummed, the tenor of the sound hiding a smile, “Wise words, I’ll grant you, but I would be more interested in finding out who wants to haunt Lady Hughes badly enough to invoke Melinöe’s help.” 

“Not at the risk of Lina’s sanity.” Hunter’s assertion brooked absolutely no argument, and though Lina was just curious enough to entertain the idea of letting Melinöe toy with her mind in exchange for knowledge she didn’t have any other access to, she also knew that there was wisdom in Hunter’s abject dismissal. 

“Does Lina know the lengths to which you’ve gone to protect her?” 

“A good deal of our relationship, my queen, is predicated in the unspoken knowledge that there is nothing that would stop one when the other is in a danger they do not need to face alone.” 

Lina stretched slightly, whining in the back of her throat at the unhappy grind of pain in muscles that technically had no business complaining like that. Hunter’s familiar hand fell to the back of her head, cradling the curve of her skull with such tenderness that it set something tense in Lina at ease, this outward signal of the devotion Hunter had long-ago resigned himself to. “Ow.” 

“Have some water before you talk me into letting you have coffee?” Hunter pleaded, and Lina groaned but nodded her head in agreement, letting Hunter take some of her weight to help her sit up.

“I’ve never seen a power like yours, Lina. I’m quite impressed.” Persephone commented lightly, readying a cup of water as Hunter settled Lina upright. “Is there anything more I can get you?” 

Lina cast a glance around their surroundings, her brow crinkling, “Where are we?” 

“The airfield.” Hunter’s voice was tight with false levity, and Lina half-wished Hunter hadn’t allowed her to regain consciousness to learn that she was about to be forced to fly. Lina shot him a look and he shrugged, "I had to make sure you were going to wake up and that you didn't do any internal damage before I could put you back out." 

Lina sighed, and, in rolling her eyes, found out that she had a disastrously pounding headache. "Okay, make it fast." 

Hunter nodded, shifting to crouch before her and flicking up one finger, a light produced from the tip that stung at her head like a needle directly into her eyes. Hunter slowly moved the light with Lina's gaze fixed on him, checking pupil reactivity with the easy precision of someone who had performed the task many, many times before. 

Lina didn't understand quite how Hunter could expend as much energy has he did in controlling her emotions without the burnout that hit her so like a freight train, but in her more dire moments, she knew that she truly did not want to know. The likelihood that Hunter simply pushed himself through the pain of it was less a likelihood than it was a certainty, and Lina knew it was a fine and terribly dangerous line that Hunter walked, but she also knew that he had been walking it for longer than she had known for certain that magic was real. 

"If two's company and three's a crowd, what are four and five?" 

"Nine." Lina replied, biting back a smile. Persephone snorted, rolling her eyes. "I'm twenty-eight, it's November, and we're in Budapest." 

"No, actually, we're in Collinstown." Hunter chirped, dimpling, and Lina let out a scoff, but she could not try to stop her grin. "We're just here waiting for our ride." 

Lina flicked her fingers at Hunter as he laughed impishly, electricity sparking over her fingertips as she did. Just that little display had the effect of a tidal wave of exhaustion. Hunter scooped her against his side again, sitting beside her once more as a bolster. "Satisfied?" 

"Mmm, moderately." Hunter hummed, running clever fingers deftly through her hair and disentangling a fairy knot, which she was prone to when put into the kind of stupor she'd been in. Lina shifted into his side, fitting easily under his arm and closing her eyes once more. "I still think you'd be fine with flying if you were to learn how to pilot, my dear." 

Lina snorted, not bothering to open her eyes; she didn't need to look to know that Hunter was smirking at her reaction to that suggestion. It was not a true fear of heights; nor was it a fear of falling, Hunter knew well, even though she'd never had the vocabulary to quite express it. It was a loss of control that she could not abide, somehow not as potently felt when it came to getting onto a train than it was on boarding an aeroplane. 

"I'd never flown anywhere before, it was quite interesting." Persephone commented lightly. Lina heard the note of doubt in Persephone's assertion that it was interesting, and she bit back a smirk of her own, knowing that the wife of the King of the Underworld would likely not particularly enjoy travel through an element claimed by either of his brothers. 

"What was it that hit us?" Lina asked hazily, remembering very blearily that there had been something wrong with the way their initial mode of transport had been so suddenly taken out. 

Lina could practically hear Persephone and Hunter exchange a look, and it was more than enough incentive for her to open her eyes to look at them. "It's difficult to say how, but we were attacked by Reapers." Persephone replied tightly, her wrath as tightly coiled as a cobra about to strike. 

"I...recognized the scent of the magic that was controlling them," Hunter added, voice gone rough and quiet. 

Lina drew on strength she was fairly sure she oughtn't possess in order to sit up and look at Hunter properly. The pale cast of his features and the haunted aspect of his eyes told her more than she could quite interpret, and as his dark eyes turned from their blank distraction of ordering words into sentences that could possibly be understood, the exhaustion, horror, and sadness in his gaze made her feel as though she had no right to claim any fatigue at all. 

"It was him...His magic." Hunter managed, "I didn't know--not back then, that he had any magic to speak of. He used to hunt magic-users for sport and considered anything that was magical...considered anything supernatural as an abomination, that's why they made him commander of our...special branch." Swallowing thickly, Hunter tore his eyes away from Lina, "Not many people can smell baseline magic--as far as I know, I'm the only person alive with that particular gift. Only when it's powerful enough can anyone else smell it. But he...he always smelled like sickly oranges. I didn't know it wasn't the curses that were said to have been cast on him, but now...now there's no way I can imagine it as anything else but Viktor's own powers." 

"He knows, then, that we're after him." Lina deduced. 

Persephone was frowning, a wrinkle between her brow that spoke of puzzle pieces that ought to fit, but she wasn't quite understanding just how they possibly could. "An...old friend with a gift for prophecy told me that we're looking for a city beneath a city, past something called the Abhainn Nimhithe." Persephone winced over the unfamiliar words on her tongue, but Lina could hear that it was Irish. The gods could speak any language spoken by those who believed in them, but it wasn't likely that Persephone would have encountered many prayers from anyone speaking that particular tongue. 

"The River Poisoning?" Hunter translated, forehead crumpling. 

"A river of poison." Lina replied, shaking her head slowly. Eyes narrowing, Lina wracked her brain for the memory just on the edge of her mind, "Why do I recognize that?" 

Persephone gave an animated shrug, indicating that she herself drew a blank. 

There was a violent rending of tyres over the loose gravel drive to the airfield, and Hunter perked up, looking towards the parking lot expectantly. Bursting into the room in long strides, a young woman strode in, her bright blue eyes sharp as she scanned the room and fell upon the huddle of them. 

"Hello, Margot." Hunter greeted, standing and opening his arms as if on autopilot as the woman launched herself into them with the grace of a prima ballerina. "Good to see you." 

Her mouth, previously a perfect purse of disapproval, had stretched into a wide, ecstatic grin at the sight of him, and it did not so much as flicker now. "I almost didn't believe her when she told me you were coming." 

Setting Margot back on her feet, Hunter rolled his eyes at that, not appearing to notice that she was wearing an engine oil-stained vest and a jumpsuit with the upper-half shrugged off and tied around her and had more than likely gotten his own clothes irreparably stained in launching herself into his arms, "You still dancing?" 

"When I can." Margot replied with a hidden smile, her lips returning to a look of pursed disapproval that Lina realized was simply the set of them. "Is this the Lina Hughes?" 

Hunter winced at the pointed way Margot had emphasized it, and Lina had a disconnected moment of wondering who the hell Margot was to Hunter Dyan. "Yes, I'm Lina. Pleasure to meet you. This is Persephone, Queen of the Underworld." 

Margot shook Persephone's hand eagerly, the grin returning, and managed somehow to pick up all of their luggage on her own while Hunter was helping Lina to stand. 

"You brought the car?" 

"Of course I brought the car," Margot replied to Hunter's question with an undertone of disbelief at the need to even ask, and Lina was struck both with the wonder of who the hell this woman was and just how young she was. 

"What car is this?" 

"The one we stole from the Blood-Miller of Verdun after we crashed a tank through his favourite supernatural-testing facility." Margot chirped brightly, and Lina nearly fell over with the shock of that sentence. 

Hunter bore her up, looking intensely uncomfortable, "Margot was...a captive at one of the facilities trying to make supernatural soldiers." 

Persephone threw Hunter a confused, nearly disbelieving look, and Margot gave a closed-lipped smile as she slung the luggage into the boot of the low, black car. "I have the gift of being unable to miss." 

Lina looked from Margot as she strode around the back of the car to the driver's seat, to Hunter as he got Lina situated behind Margot and opened the door for the hellhound to leap up between himself and Lina in the back of the car, Persephone easing herself into the front without hesitation, too intrigued to bother with anything as trivial as the social etiquette of letting the two old friends sit together. 

"How is she?" Hunter asked over the powerful purr of the engine as Margot pulled onto the road. 

"She's panicking, but won't admit it. She's leaving me in charge of the kids while you go on the hunt, and is focusing her clamour on that." Margot replied with a roll of her eyes. 

"What about your...tutelage, with Artemis?" Hunter asked, the stilt of the words ringing as a coded question. 

"Artemis is considering joining you on the hunt, but I think I'm going to play the 'protector of women and children' card to make sure she doesn't. You and Olivia need the closure." 

Hunter looked grim, but didn't reply as they picked up more speed than probably really advisable on the roads from Collinstown to the Northeastern coast. 

"Martin Drakon of the Budapest vampires has offered to come help run the Sanctuary." Persephone offered, and Margot's gaze flicked to hers, her grin full of mischief. 

"I would have thought there were not many children at present." Lina noted. The fae civil war had seen many of their children orphaned, yes, but the fae did not consider blood to denote actual lineage, and as such, the children were folded back into their world without mind for who their parents had been before. 

"Magical children born to mundane parents aren't rare." Margot replied quietly, "I was...I was lucky, that my gift was something so subtle." 

Hunter reached for Margot's shoulder, and Lina nearly startled as a waft of sandalwood and ginger hit her nose; the scent of Hunter's magic, strong enough for her to detect, apparently being put to use to bring Margot out of the darkness that Lina hadn't meant to lead her into. 

"Oliv--Grams has always been busy, with her children--whether they're alive or dead." 

Lina narrowed her eyes at the correction Margot had made to herself, "Grams is Olivia Owens, isn't she?" Lina accused Hunter quietly, a part of her desperately curious about Margot's assertion, but a larger part of her nearly desperate to wipe away the thoughts that had Margot gripping the wheel to the point of white knuckles. "How the hell could a woman--" 

"It's complicated." Hunter replied tightly. 

"We've got three hours before we get there, gorgeous, you may as well explain." Margot chided, and Lina felt a small surge of thankfulness that Margot sounded as utterly disappointed in Lina's lack of knowledge about this as Lina felt. 

Hunter cleared his throat, "Liv and I were in the war together, as I've told you," it'd been one of the very few things Hunter had told Lina about the war, that a woman named Olivia Owens had been an incredibly powerful creature who had saved Hunter and been saved by Hunter well enough that, if Lina ever was in a tight enough spot that she needed a rescue, and Hunter wasn't there to make the call himself, she was the one to summon, "Olivia was in her late sixties when she enlisted." Lina blinked, not understanding how the woman who barely looked as old as the barely-eighteen Hunter standing beside her in Hunter's single photo of his platoon could possibly have been in her forties. "She...has many gifts, but one of the big ones is the ability to glamour herself. When at home at the Sanctuary, she's usually her natural age, and she's known as Grams because of it, and because she takes care of so many. When she enlisted...she de-aged herself. When she does that, it gives her the advantages of the age she chooses." 

"How many children does she care for?" Persephone asked curiously. 

"Right now, eight." Margot replied, "Back when she enlisted, there were fifteen. One of the oldest decided to enlist himself, and got himself captured and tortured for his troubles." 

Hunter reached forwards again, though this time there was no magic behind it; only the simple action of putting a hand on Margot's arm in comfort before explaining, "Margot and Horatio were in the same camp. They...they tortured the magic out of him." The natural press of Margot's mouth tightened even further, and the leather covering of the wheel in her hands groaned under the force of her grip. It was a loss that she carried still, and Lina had to wonder if Horatio's upbringing in a house of gifted children hadn't extended a kind of kindness and kinship from the captured boy to the girl who could not have been more than eight when she had been in that hell-scape. 

“I didn’t know that was even possible,” Persephone breathed, a horror written across her beautiful face in fonts of the grief and tragedy. 

“Neither did they.” Margot responded heavily, smoothly overtaking a lorry. “They wanted to…distill his powers. To understand them enough to use them for themselves. Horatio had the ability to…adapt, to camouflage himself to his surroundings, no matter what they were.” 

“How in the world was he caught?” Lina asked, voice small and astonished. 

“He tried to free us, after he’d infiltrated the unit that held us.” Margot replied heavily. “He could mask his appearance, could pick up any language and dialect he came into contact with, but he could not mirror the cruelty.” 

Lina recoiled against the ominous agony that threaded through that statement: the list of things that she knew and objectively understood had happened, but could not comprehend the evil that would drive a person to commit such atrocities. Beside her, the hellhound let out a low whine, balling himself up tight against her thigh, a warmth and weight to focus on beyond the spiral of thought of what it was that Hunter had lived through. 

Lina glanced down, and immediately reached to lay her hands over Hunter’s, trying to soothe the agitated way that his index finger picked at the skin surrounding his thumb nail. When they were young, Lina could distantly remember Hunter picking at that skin until he bled, any time someone had bullied him about the circumstances of his birth. If Lina had the ability, she would have gone back in time to deck the little monsters that had told Hunter that his mother had hated him so much, she had died giving birth to him. She knew it was a losing battle to try platitudes or comfort against the demons that now sank their claws into Hunter’s psyche, but she was not about to stop trying to fight it. 

“I didn’t know that Olivia had…joined…the war effort, though I suppose I should not be surprised.” 

Out of the corner of her eye, Lina caught the flash of puzzlement that that admission of Persephone’s had caused; and though it seemed as though Lina were the last to know that Olivia Owens was Grams, she was at least a little comforted that Persephone was at least a little affected by the news that Hunter and Grams had, in fact, served together in the war. 

“Liv has been jumping ages…” Margot told Hunter pointedly, and Hunter winced. “By the time I left to get you, she was toying with the idea of going as an incredibly precocious six-year-old, just to milk the unsuspecting for every ounce of advantage she can.” 

Hunter snorted, and the corner of Margot’s mouth twitched, a dimple flashing in her cheek as she and Hunter appeared to share a memory with little more than a glance exchanged between them in the rear view mirror. 

“She hated being that short,” Hunter pointed out. 

“So I told her,” Margot giggled. 

Hunter laughed, the sound warmer and richer than Lina had heard it in a long, long time. Lina knew easily that it was not a conscious thing that Hunter did, as his happiness coloured the air around them all with a taste of honey and roses. It was like nothing Lina had ever experienced before: Hunter's emotions always so tightly kept that they did not leak over onto her, not really. It was not a two-way street, the empathy: Hunter was not the open book to her that she was to him, and though she had never allowed it to bother her before, it looked to be fast becoming a grating piece of grit in the perfect machinery of their partnership. 

With a pang, Lina felt her anxiety rear up once more; feeding ravenously from the growing doubt that their partnership was actually a partnership, with each of them on equal ground. The shambling fear was enough to choke at the back of her throat; it was surely enough for Hunter to sense it. 

With a silent incline of his head, Hunter asked if she wanted him to curtail that agonizing misery rather than simply doing so. Lina knew that telepathy was not one of Hunter's many gifts, but in that moment, she had to question it; because nothing else could have pacified her the same way that simple act did. It was more than most anyone else would have done; having had permission already to soothe the wild tide of her emotions, most would not have asked for permission, would not have granted autonomy of her emotions, and would simply have stifled them, stifled her, without a thought. 

"Margot, could we find somewhere to stop along the way? I think we could all do with some food, but Lina particularly needs to build back her strength. She used far too much magic to get us here." 

Margot's brows raised, an indulgent smile spreading over her lips, "I know a place or two." 

Hours later, as they pulled towards the quiet manor house, Lina grabbed Hunter's hand perhaps harder than she really needed to, if his hiss of pain was anything to go by. 

"Steady," Hunter murmured, reaching forwards to lay a hand on Persephone's shoulder as well. Like the sudden drop of an unexpected cold snap after the first blush of spring, Lina felt Persephone's ire at Hunter's presumption to comfort her, even if it was actually needed. 

The hellhound bundled cozily between her and Hunter on the back seat still growled lowly, and Persephone visibly shook herself, the ice dropping away even though Hunter's hand hadn't yet. 

"I'm alright," Persephone assured quietly, "just...worried." 

If they were right, and Viktor Chace was the force they were after, it was more than enough to be worried about; but Lina didn't think that that was what rode Persephone's shoulders as they pulled into the drive, the scent of the ocean mingling with the smoke of a peat fire beckoning the weary and ragged into the open arms of the great house. 

Chimes made from sea glass tinkled as the car was parked, and Lina shuddered harder than she would have under the touch of death itself, the hair on her arms on-end at the strange sense of being weighed and measured swept over her. "The wards are rather strong." Hunter commented a little tightly, and Lina took comfort that she was not the only one effected. 

"Olivia has been...layering." Margot answered darkly, and Hunter and she shared a worried look as they all climbed from the car. "Initially, she wanted to make the wards so strong that they wouldn't allow anyone through without a charm-key." 

Hunter frowned deeply, "Which is too easily misplaced into the wrong hands for Liv to think that that would be good solution to her problem." 

Margot looked back over to Hunter from across the car, her features more grave than someone so young should have had to be. Pulling down the collar of her shirt, Margot showed Hunter the smudge of dark ink laid into the soft flesh under her collarbone, and though the gathering dusk was too deep for anyone to be able to make out the detail, Hunter nodded with barely a glance at it; knowing exactly what it was that Margot was not saying. 

"She's tattooed the charms?" Persephone asked as Hunter and Margot moved to trudge towards the house, the oppressive sense of foreboding that Lina now knew was the wards growing stronger with each step. 

"No, she's only keyed the wards to allow Margot, myself, and Olivia through without difficulty." Hunter replied grimly. 

"How?" 

Lina stopped dead, wobbling just enough so that Persephone stepped up to steady her, Hunter and Margot on the porch now, "Chace...He branded those who served under him in the war." Lina mumbled through numb lips. The implication that Margot, a child saved from the camps, who should have been protected, had been branded as well was too much for Lina to stomach for a moment, the bile clawing at the back of her throat. 

This time, Persephone's ire was not cold: it was an unbearable, cloying heat; the kind that choked the growth of crops and withered flowers before they could even bloom. Lina nearly lost her legs entirely at the sudden surge of power from the woman holding her up, but Persephone bore up under Lina's weight all too well, practically carrying her forward into the soft glow of the porch light, and the warmth of the rooms beyond. 

Just on the edge of Lina's hearing; so soft as to nearly be unnoticeable, had Lina not learned quickly to be able to sense such things keenly enough to get out of the way once disaster struck, Persephone's snake tattoo hissed irritably at the wash of the wards before a woman so stunningly beautiful that Lina could barely comprehend it turned from a warm embrace with Hunter to smile softly at Lina and Persephone, moving gracefully forwards to plant a kiss on first Persephone's forehead, then Lina's, her smile impish and daring in a way that made Lina seriously question whether she was related to Hunter, even as the tension of the wards broke over them like the cool breath of a summer storm. 

"Lina, Persephone, this is Olivia Owens--Grams." Hunter introduced shyly. 

With the magic that had tried its damnedest to push her into running as far away as she could, as quickly as she could, finally broken; Lina blinked, taking in the woman reaching an arm out to wrap around Hunter's waist. If someone were to only glance their way, Olivia's features would almost supply a classification of blood relation between Hunter and her.

Taking her own weight once more, Lina almost missed it as Olivia's features, head to toe, blurred in the most mind-bending of ways, her features reshaping themselves until a woman of around seventy, her eyes bright blue-grey, and her hair a respectable blonde light enough to almost hide that she was going to grey; taking the place of the dark-eyed, dark-haired beauty that had greeted them, though Grams, in what Lina assumed was more her true form, was no less beautiful. 

"I'm so happy to finally meet you, Lina." The joy of that statement lit Olivia from within in such a way that Lina immediately understood that those who were graced to have that light shone upon them could easily be beguiled into the most ridiculous things in order to keep that light directed their way. "And, Persephone, I am honoured to have the trust of the Iron Queen to stem this terror we face." 

Vaguely impressed by the strange balance between the figure of the doting grandmother and the formality required for receiving one such as Persephone, Lina smiled at Olivia, reaching to let Hunter take her arm and draw her into the warm, cozy sitting room just off of the entrance hallway. 

"If you think you can be comfortable with it, Lina, we do have a room prepared for you: you don't have to attend this particular conclave." Olivia offered. 

The concern sounded very much like the woman who had helped Hunter and she through all that had come from their partnership together, but Lina was not quite able to reconcile the idea that the woman who had talked her through the first fumbling attempts at controlling her magic was the woman who Hunter had charged into a war beside. Grams was and always had been a figure of myth to Lina, but to have the myth made real—no matter the circumstances of all that Lina and Hunter regularly faced—was something that made Lina feel as though she were about to slip into an undertow. 

The protracted moment between offer and indecision was cut off before it could begin, a chime constructed of crystals shattering violently from beside the fireplace. 

Olivia cast an assessing eye over the damage as a wicker broom swept itself into motion, an identical chime taking the place of the first by unseen hands. “That god of yours is looking for you, but I’m afraid the Sanctuary’s wards can’t allow more than one deity at a time, Lina.” 

Lina blinked, temporarily pulling up short of the point, until Persephone shifted in her peripheral vision, “Most gods are too territorial to gather.” Persephone murmured as if making an allowance. 

“But you don’t deal in loyalty: you’re far too feared to trifle with things like that.” Olivia replied just as smoothly, and Lina all too willingly let Hunter manoeuvre her into a seat on the overstuffed sofa, her mind muzzily giving her the absent thought that Olivia’s home had been carefully arranged so that none of the seats were in a position to be indefensible, something that Hunter took pains in making sure of wherever they travelled. 

"Tea?" Margot did not so much offer as ask for an excuse to escape the room; the inclusion of Olivia--of Grams--making her presence feel more like the awkward addition of someone utterly uninterested in the proceedings, as their part had already been decided. In truth, Lina could empathize: being the heir to the Hughes fortune had meant being included far too often in meetings that, while deemed "essential" by those running the company she was technically the owner of, did not much matter to her in the end. 

Lina's tenuous grasp of what it was she was supposed to do for the company her mother had built into an empire was not due to truly being uncaring of the legacy: Lina felt she had better things to do with her time and energy than to pretend she gave a damn about quarterly earnings. Lina had been the creative force behind half the patents to have been put into the holdings of their company in the time since she had come into her inheritance and been permitted to show the technology her mother had loved and worked hard to create the love that Lina in turn had garnered in order to feel some kind of connection to her heritage. 

The hellhound hopped onto Lina's lap and cuddled there, and though Lina had never been to the Sanctuary before, she could feel the near-unrecognizable sensation of home press into the edges, relaxing her in ways she was abjectly unaccustomed to. 

"A river of poison," Hunter began, and if Lina had been any less inclined to pay the utmost attention to their host, she may have missed the way that Olivia froze at that, “it’s something just on the edge of my remembering what it is, and it’s driving me mad.” 

Lina could see the flicker of Olivia’s eyes towards a collection of journals ensconced on one of the overburdened bookshelves; more recent years in familiar, respectable tomes, but Lina got the sense that the older books were no less journals than those respectable books. "Whose are those?" Lina asked softly, her eyes tracking over the dated spines until the undated took over; each one progressively more worn with age as she looked. 

"They belong to the keepers of the Sanctuary." Olivia answered in a strange, detached voice. "There is no telling how long the Sanctuary has actually been around, but for as long as there have been supplies available, there have been records kept by those who are entrusted to keep it. Somewhere in there, you'll find your river of poison, or the story of it." 

Hunter had frozen in much the same manner as Olivia had when he realized she meant the journals, and Lina got the strangest inkling that he was not supposed to have read the journals that he must've, at some point, poured through in order to have that dim remembrance of the myth. 

"You were supposed to be resting," Grams scolded Hunter mildly after a moment, and Hunter put on a grin, trying and failing miserably to look as innocent as he could. 

"I don't do stagnancy for very long very well: just ask Lina, she had to literally sit on me when we were in Alexandria." 

"While you were under the mummy's curse?" Margot snorted, "Why does this not surprise me?" 

"You were hit with a mummy's curse?" Persephone half-shrilled. 

"Not quite." Olivia murmured, amusement pulling at her lips as she waved a hand as if the reaction of a goddess like Persephone were as nothing but smoke. "The curse wasn't a curse from the dead to the living, Persephone: There's no need to skin Osiris." 

The answering curl of Persephone's lips very nearly surprised Lina, before the goddess's eyes turned from Grams to her, her voice low and lilting on the promise, "For future reference, if you should need help with something in the dominion of the dead, all you need do is ask." 

Hunter's father had told Lina a story, once; of being given a gift that you dare never open, never use, because to use it would mean far too much for you to be able to face. Persephone's deference, Lina couldn't help feeling, would prove to be one such gift. 

"In any case," Hunter gently cut through the threads of tension, "we have our reading cut out for us, if we're to find our needle in that particular haystack." 

"There are some...other records...I need to look into, as well." Persephone volunteered hesitantly, and Olivia levelled a look on the queen of the dead that Lina knew instinctively would catch even the most wayward of children by the collar and pin them to the wall until they'd come clean about what mischief they were making. Under that look, Persephone actually coloured slightly, ducking her eyes before she elaborated, "It...I was told by an old friend--one who happens to be dead. Cora Ó Faolían." 

"She wants closure on her brother's fate." Olivia intoned; not a question, though when Persephone nodded her agreement, she looked somehow disappointed at the situation. "Can you remember what, exactly, she told you?" 

"In the city beneath the city, across the...river of poison--" 

"Translated." Hunter added, and Olivia nodded. 

"--There are gates that won't open but for the blood of a huntsman--no, sorry, she said the huntsman--" Persephone's brow wrinkled, and Lina felt a curl of sympathy: she didn't like being the centre of this kind of scrutiny any more than Persephone appeared to, "and she said that what we hunt wants the power that lies beyond those gates. If I save them, then I stop it. Once and for all." 

Olivia raised her chin, pensive and quiet for a long moment, "For one of Cora's predictions, I would agree with you that we ought to look at what she asked you to look at. Remind me what her brother was called?" 

"Trystin." Persephone answered, and Olivia nodded, rising and crossing to a desk to root through one of the drawers, coming up with a book improbably large for the drawer in which it had been stashed. 

In Grams' hands, the book seemed to be at home; her fingers easily flicking through the pages until she settled the spine in her palm, having found the page she looked for, which was some pages away from an obviously well-viewed section of the book. 

Silent still, Olivia handed the book to Persephone, who barked a laugh, shaking her head, "Very clever." 

A ghost of a smile passed over Olivia's rosebud mouth as she settled back into her seat with a sigh that Lina didn't quite dare call 'weary'. "I deal with too many factions not to want to keep track of the most volatile of the lot." 

"So you made a log of the gods." 

"No, that came with the job. I just made sure that it's enchanted in such a way that it keeps track of the status of all of the gods." 

Lina's eyes widened with the abject covetousness that flooded her at the idea of a compendium of gods; let alone the idea of having one made with the lore of the monsters that were real. Beside her, Hunter sniggered, and Lina's head whipped around to glare at him for the impudence. 

"I have considered making you a bestiary of sorts, but I'm afraid that being the keeper of the Sanctuary leaves me somewhat lacking for experience beyond what Hunter and I dealt with in the war." Olivia offered, "We have the literature here to do much of the digging that I've done in the past for you two; but I can't say what still exists or what is lost, anymore." 

Lina frowned at that, considering now, surrounded and pressed in upon on all sides with the books that, no doubt, she and Hunter had forced Olivia to pour over while they were gallivanting off in the world. 

“How long can we afford to spend researching?” Hunter asked Persephone quietly. 

The subject of their timeline hadn’t really occurred to Lina; for the most part, they did not work under the pressure of a true deadline. 

“If I may answer that one for you…I would guess that we have about a month.” Olivia spoke up in reply, her features bland in response to the surprise from Persephone. “You believe that enough power has been siphoned?” Persephone nodded, “Then I’m afraid the best time to use it is coming rather quickly, and we had better be prepared. Potentially, if enough power has been gathered, then he could perform whatever nasty little ritual he intends to perform at any time…but if he waits, next month there is an eclipse, which will help thin the veil between the living and dead, and leave him with a surplus, however small, of the magic he’s hoarded.” 

“Which would be just like him.” Margot growled, her venom somehow all the more potent for her youth. 

“Quite.” Hunter agreed, voice curved with a smile. 

Sucking in a slow breath, Lina blinked and found herself struggling to reopen her eyes. The crash was not particularly surprising, but she was rather a little put-out that she wasn’t managing her exhaustion as handily as she normally could. Out of the corner of her eye, Lina caught the barest tremble in Hunter’s hands, then the exhausted flicker of his ridiculous, long lashes, and the realization that he was draining himself to lend her what energy he could made her abruptly angry. Blinking, Hunter visibly bit back a wince when he realized her glare was directed his way, and the cheesy smile he offered in the wince’s stead was not sufficient. “Stop it.” 

“You’ll pass out.” Hunter didn’t even try to inflect his voice as if it were an argument, and Lina realized that with what Hunter was doing, neither of them were going to be making it much longer. “You need to get in touch with the cad you call your lover, the rest of us need to divide the labour, then we can all sleep.” 

“Or,” the magnanimous note entering Olivia’s voice told her just how worried she should be about what Olivia was offering, “I could always get in touch with that godling of yours for you, dear.” 

Lina had no delusions as to how Hunter felt towards her arrangement with her god of sport, and she did not need to have genius-level intellect to know that that sentiment would be more widely shared. “I had better do it. Thank you for the offer, though.” 

Margot conducted Lina to a telephone with the barely-contained glee of true amusement, and Lina had to bite back her smile as she dialled for the usual haunt. She knew, dimly, that it had to be a concern that she had not been immediately locatable, but the speed with which the line picked up was still something of a shock. 

“Where are you?” 

“In the Sanctuary.” Lina found herself snapping the reply. In a strange, detached way, Lina became aware that she was now too tired to control her temper, even with Hunter giving her a boost. She wasn’t awake enough to feel the wrath that boiled over, and she abstractly wondered if she was only at the boiling point now through a combination of her exhaustion and a walking reminder of one of the greatest love stories she had ever had the pleasure of hearing in Persephone’s true history with Hades. In any case, she wasn’t sure it mattered. “Had you bothered to answer this telephone a week ago, you would have known that I went to bloody Hungary, and had you answered it yesterday,” she wasn’t sure of the day, but her anger was on too set a track to cause her idle wondering if it had actually only been a day, “then you would have known that Persephone has arrived in need of aid.” There was a sputtering of syllables, but Lina simply let out a sigh over the line; the sigh she’d been carrying since finding out her “true love” had no real intentions towards truth; in any case, not truth for her. When it had first happened, Lina had comforted herself that, perhaps, he was following his own truth—now, Lina was too tired to make up more excuses for being treated badly. “Don’t come looking for me. Don’t try to contact us again. I think…I think I’m done playing your games.” 

Lina let his voice try to stammer up a response for a beat, two, and then quietly replaced the phone on the cradle; the sensation of detachment worsening now that the frustration she carried in the pit of her stomach had been unleashed upon the world. 

While she could not sense people in the same way that Hunter could, Lina knew that Persephone was keeping her distance, but wanted to draw near, and that Hunter had scolded both Olivia and Margot into distraction from pressing in comfort when Lina didn’t think that was what she could handle. “Yes, Persephone?” Lina finally beckoned when she realized she couldn’t yet make herself move; either to rejoin the group, or to escape to a bed. 

The goddess of spring and the dead stepped from the doorway without pity or sorrow in her leaf-green eyes. Instead, Persephone wore an expression of vicious, yet restrained, pride. “They never tell the part of my story when I chose myself over the expectations placed upon me. You, I know, have been choosing yourself over and over, and this is just another petal on this particular bloom. No one understands how hard it is unless they’ve had to do it.” 

Lina met Persephone’s gaze, “I don’t feel very strong right now.” Lina admitted. 

“Yes, well, complete physical exhaustion will do that to even a queen. C’mon, I’ll get you to somewhere you can rest.” 

Persephone’s offered hand was warm and electrically vital in Lina’s, her smug approval a blanket and a shield.


	5. Chapter 5

The problem with ghosts was that though they did not physically take up space, they psychically and emotionally took up space. 

The Sanctuary was positively writhing with the imprints of those who had come and gone forever from its walls; those who wanted to ask the keeper of the Sanctuary for some miracle or another, to help them. It was not physically claustrophobic, but for someone with a sensitivity to the thoughts and feelings of others, it was like drowning in a sea of unseeable bodies, all grasping and yanking desperately for their own salvation. 

The presence of the goddess of the dead helped little; and Olivia Owens, an embodiment of the dichotomy of life and death as well as the keeper of the Sanctuary, helped improbably less. 

When Olivia Owens had died in Hunter Dyan’s arms, he hadn’t known what she was. 

Years later, Hunter still was not completely certain what, exactly, she was, but when she had come back just minutes after dissolving to ash in his hands; for all intents and purposes a blank slate without thought or memory, Hunter had begun to conjecture just what it was that a powerhouse of an old lady could be beneath the sheen of her glamours. 

It was sheer luck, he knew, that when he had reached out to sweep this blank slate to cover from the gunfire that had already taken her life once, and that the act of his fingers meeting hers had dragged her life, and her memories out through him. 

One moment, a woman in white who had no idea of the world or her place in it. The next, Olivia had come back from the nothingness. She had come back with a terrible scream of pain; the scream that Olivia had not allowed when the bullets had first pierced her stomach. Hunter had thought for a wild moment that the woman in white had resurrected herself from ash only to be killed again, but it was pain without a source that had broken that scream from her throat. And with that, the woman in white was Olivia once more. 

The day dawned on the Sanctuary with a whisper of something that was not quite foreboding: there was a stillness to the world as if it had sucked in a breath before a plunge, and it made gooseflesh stand on Hunter’s arms. 

When he had read the diaries of the previous keepers of the Sanctuary, Hunter had not yet seen Olivia rebirth herself; but now that he turned his mind to those memories together, there was a heavy truth in his chest: Olivia Owens, in one life or another, had been the keeper of the Sanctuary for as long as there had been a Sanctuary. And, if Hunter knew her as well as he thought he did, she likely did not know that fact herself. 

It had been as much a shock to Olivia that she had brought herself back as it had been to Hunter, and with that single, horrifying truth, Hunter had come to understand why Olivia had chosen a face remotely beautiful enough that when her own powers surprised her, the face she’d chosen gave nothing away. 

Originally, Hunter had supposed that it was his own inability to fully know his powers that had made him an ally to Olivia. His powers grew the more kinds of magic he had been exposed to. Olivia had theorized that he was a magical mimic: picking up drips and drabs of whatever magic surrounded him. The longer he spent in the presence of the magical, the more he picked up. He had never admitted it to anyone, but it went beyond mimicking the magic of only other magic-users: his time with Martin during the war had given increased the sensitivity of his ears to be able to pick a pulse out of a cacophony; his time with Olivia had given him his empathy and a skill for fire. After he had picked up the empathy, however, Hunter had come to realize just how much a curse his particular strain of magic was, simply because he could not control it; and would not have chosen to pick up the skillset he had already acquired. 

Lina had initially been a balm to him: without her own magic, he should have been safe from gaining anything else he would feel better off without. When she had been infected with the magic she had been infected with, Hunter had almost laughed at his own stupidity for assuming he could escape so lightly from learning magics he did not want to know. 

The crux of the matter for Hunter was not so much that he did not want to learn all the magics he could: more that, without the ability to choose what magic he learned, the lack of control was as good as paralyzing. 

Hunter stood in the waxing light of dawn, feeling somehow daunted to the point of being dwarfed in the face of all that they had to sort through--never mind all that would come after, when it was time to face the one man he had truly hoped he had murdered. 

The breath of cold air on the back of his neck was not necessary to announce the presence of one of Grams's many ghosts; this one a child of four, looking smudged around the edges with the evidence of his death, and solemn as the grave meant to give him rest. 

"Hello, Tomas." Hunter greeted quietly as the boy moved a chair to the bookshelf without touching it, climbing onto it with a determination that prickled wrongly at Hunter's instincts; his unconscious desire for the boy to be a child, free to be as flighty as smoke caught in the wind off the cliffs. 

There had never been a response from Tomas, not to Hunter, who by dint of being male reminded Tomas of the very human monster who had beaten the boy to death for knowing more than anyone ought to have about the secrets that would drive a man to beat his own son to death. 

They had been in Spain when Tomas had appeared to Olivia. Hunter had been stabbed through the left thigh with the remains of a crumbling building, and Olivia had taken another part of the building to the back of her head. 

Tomas had died fifty years before they had gotten there; long before Olivia Owens, in the incarnation of Olivia Owens she had been since Hunter had known her, could have saved the poor boy. But when the child had appeared to them, bearing the supplies they had lost in the bombing...Olivia had taken the boy in, as if it had been a weight on her conscience, not to have saved him all those decades before. He was not the first of her ghost-children, Hunter knew; he would not be the last. 

As strange as it was to see a ghost inhabiting a house with a goddess of the dead, Hunter set it aside when Tomas turned to him suddenly, holding out a book in offering that was nowhere near old enough to be the one that they would be looking for. Hunter knew better, after all these years, than to doubt him though. 

The book was gritty with the rubble of fallen dynasties, and even if Hunter hadn't been the one to buy the volume for Olivia in the first place, he would have known that this book came from their years together in the war. 

_"There are some things,"_ Tomas's voice was distorted to Hunter's ears; as all ghosts' were, _"that no god can forgive."_

The child flickered from his perch atop the chair, and faded away like a piece of film reel left too long on the light, leaving Hunter clutching a journal he dared not open, with a lump in his throat that he dared not think about. 

"He's right, you know." Persephone spoke up softly from the doorway. 

She was dressed in the kind of gauzy nightclothes Hunter would have expected from someone cast in their stories to be as frail as she had been cast. Not that it surprised him, really; better to lean into the expectation and allow the underestimation than to play the wildcard of one's true power too soon. 

"There are some gods who would claim to forgive any that would ask for forgiveness, but I have never met one that can truly forgive someone who has been, unquestionably, unforgivable."

"What would make one unforgivable?" Hunter asked idly, abstracted by the consideration of whether he would ever feel as if he had a place in asking anyone to forgive him for all that he had done; all that had come before to deliver him into this room of this house, surrounded by these people and facing this fate that he still could not conceive of in facing Viktor Chace. 

"I am not the most forgiving of goddesses," Persephone hedged, reaching to take the book from his unprotesting grip, "but I would start with the lack of true repentance." 

"True repentance brings change." 

Persephone looked up at him, her eyes a completely different green from Lina's, though they were both, undeniably, green. Hunter did not protest when Persephone tipped onto her tip-toes to wrap him in her arms, though it was less a hint than it was an anvil dropped from on high that he looked just as bad as he usually felt. 

"What can I do for you, my queen?" Hunter asked after a long beat, his throat thick as she embraced him. 

"You can start by telling me why you're awake, Hunter. And then finish by explaining to me what I can do to truly help you bear what's coming." 

Hunter twitched in her arms, and it was enough of a tell for Persephone to slowly retreat, her gaze too cunning by miles and her full mouth twitching with a knowing smirk.

"You are regularly visited by Melinöe, aren't you? So regularly that you don't even need her presence for your ghosts to come haunting you." 

Hunter knew that the pain behind his eyes was something he needed to get better at hiding, "Are they ghosts at this point, or are they simply the nightmares that come with them?" 

With that question, every sharp edge to Persephone's gloriously beautiful face softened in shared anguish and sorrow, because with that one question he had revealed the desperate and undoubtedly foolish hope that the shades of his nightmares were not truly the dead they wore the faces of; not for himself, but for the souls that would be haunting him if they were more than the memory of those moments of agony. Those ghosts that would have haunted him, Hunter honestly hoped were at peace. 

"You were never cut out for a life of battle, were you? Even this battle you've chosen--" Persephone cut herself off, and Hunter felt the threat of tears at his throat. 

"I don't want to be a killer."

Persephone's forehead screwed in on itself as she tried to find the way to argue the very same argument he waged within himself with every creature he and Lina were forced to kill when peace was completely ruled out as an option. There was no good way to explain how the protection of innocents; the stopping of a monster, made you less of a monster for having the blood of the guilty on your hands. Never in his life had Hunter been able to understand how a person could want a life for a life. Not when it threatened the lives of those he loved; and not when he had made the choice to take a life in order to preserve the lives of untold victims. It was a ledger he could not reconcile; an account that there was no way for him to take measure of. It meant that he was never to forgive himself, let alone dare to think he deserved to ask for forgiveness. 

Persephone's hands were strong, and though they were not calloused with work, they had the impossible-to-place sense of being hands long-used to work. As they folded around the curves of his jaw, her eyes shone up into his; green searching for something from the darkening brown, like a plant buried too deeply and about to lose all sight of the sun. 

"I know your dead," Persephone murmured at last, "and this may be no comfort to you, Hunter, but I will scream it until you hear me: You are no killer for the deaths you have wrought. You are no monster for culling the world of the demons that would eat it whole. There is no way to give these words the power they need, I know...but you have to know, that even the dead put in my realm by your hands...even they would forgive you--hell, most would thank you, for taking them from the world before they could get any further into ruining it." 

Hunter's eyes tightened, his body going completely rigid beneath the soft touch of Persephone's uncompromising hands. "Who in their right mind would _thank me_ for killing them?" 

Persephone's face, ruined with mingled grief and pain before, got somehow, impossibly, more dire, "Those who were not in their right mind--were _stolen_ from their right mind before you reached them, and stopped them from doing more harm than they had already caused." 

Hunter shuddered slightly, reaching up finally to remove Persephone's hands from his jaw. Her wrist was so small in his hand, and he knew that only a monster like him would think both of the ease with which he would be able to break such a fragile thing, and all the ways he would stop anyone, including himself, from ever even alluding to such an act. 

“Where did you learn how to see ghosts, Hunter?”

“I’ve always been able to see them.” Hunter replied more steadily than he expected; he knew very well that seeing the dead without having died was too rare for him to have easily picked it up. His experiences with the embodiments of death came too late in the game for him to have been able to grow up cared for by the young man that had been murdered in their little house. Death was all about rules: and though they could bend easily enough if you knew who to ask, they couldn’t truly be broken. 

A storm roiled over Persephone's features at that answer, and though the light in her eyes told him very well that she was not satisfied, and that her curiosity would come to bear; he could also read that she knew better than to chase after the answers from him when he had none to give and no interest in fathoming the depths of his past or his powers.

Persephone easily stole the book from Hunter's hand, and flipped open the journal as if putting punctuation on their thoughts; as if Hunter would forget that he ought not to have known the things that he knew all too well. "This is from the war?" Persephone's hand delicately pulled a medal that had been placed as a bookmark from the page that had naturally fallen open for her, and when Hunter was too long staring at the blood spattered on the medal, she glanced up at him expectantly. 

Hunter's voice, when he managed to force it from his throat, was tight with the memories of just why Olivia had come to own that medal, and just why it was spattered in the blood of its original owner, "Yes. I bought it for her...when hers was lost." 

Persephone blinked, the question implicit: How was the previous volume lost? 

"She was shot. Gut shot. Terribly painful--fucking awful way to go...and when she finally did, she burst into flames. The book was in her pocket when she did." Persephone didn't bat an eyelash at the revelation that Olivia Owens was far more than a simple witch, and Hunter took full note, "You aren't surprised...you know what she is." 

"I am the Queen of the Dead, Hunter. Above all others, I am the queen that rules those that have passed. How am I not to know what she is--" 

"She doesn't." Hunter cut in, his voice revealing more than he wanted it to in the tension that it held like a banner of war. "She doesn't know what she is. Of that, I am quite certain." 

"She knows that she is immortal...of a fashion." Persephone prevaricated, gesturing like a leaf unfurling to the sun towards the shelf they stood before, and all the history it contained--all of the incarnations of Olivia Owens that it held the knowledge of. "There is a price to all things, and you know this very well, _Hunter_ Dyan." Persephone said his chosen name as if she was ready to use his given name as a threat, and Hunter once would have balked at anyone calling him the name his mother had given him just before she'd died birthing him. 

"The pain." The words surfaced through Hunter as though someone else was speaking them, "When she came back...and she touched me--when I brought her back to who she'd been...she screamed from the pain, and it killed everyone but us in a ten-mile radius." 

"You were her anchor," Persephone noted, "but having an anchor comes at the price of having that anchor carry with it the pain you have suffered. She felt the pain of dying, in that moment she touched you." 

It stole Hunter's breath, to think that he had been connected to that scream, that had haunted him just as surely as his other ghosts. 

Persephone took the journal and wandered to the bay window, sitting in the light of the gathering dawn and turning her attention to the nearly-illegible scrawl upon the page. 

There was no voice left within Hunter to air the concern that there were some pains that you could die from.


	6. Chapter 6

_'Hunter and I have had something of a disagreement._

_We met a woman today, Maggie, who was put into a power-dampener against her will. Her magic is cut off, completely locked away. If that were not enough to drive one crazy: she is immortal, and will never escape the power waiting under her skin._

_Hunter feels that we should not help her, but hide her, lest she get dragged as deeply into this as we have been. An immortal soldier would be a lovely addition for dear Chace, after all._

_And while I do agree with him on that; that to free her from one prison, to perhaps trap her into another, I do not know that it is right to allow the poor woman's choice to be taken from her now, as it had been taken from her when she was first trapped.'_

Persephone drew in a slow breath, blinking as she lifted her eyes from the page still gritty with the unending dust and mud and blood that had prevailed throughout the war. Olivia's journal was one that Hunter himself had not pulled, Persephone had managed to deduce that much. 

A cup of tea sat steaming before her, biscuits laid neatly on the saucer-edge, and Persephone let out of small huff of a laugh, not bothering to wonder at why she had not heard the sustenance delivered when she'd been so deeply entrenched in the looping scrawl on the page that she could see the after-image of the shape of Olivia's handwriting on her eyes. 

Outside the warmth and comfort of the Sanctuary, Persephone could hear the rage of a storm, and though the house looked as though it ought to be drafty, she was precisely comfortable where she sat, her hellhound curled up on her feet and a fire crackling merrily in the fireplace. It was part of the magic of the Sanctuary, she knew, to be as comfortable and as comforting as possible to those seeking sanctuary in its walls. 

Lina had yet to surface from her room, and according to Hunter, it was more than likely she wouldn't for at least a day. Margot, in the meantime, had offered to stand-in, she and Hunter splaying a selection of the journals on the floor with them as they built themselves what Persephone could only call a nest: the layered blankets and pillows interspersed with notes Hunter was half-heartedly taking for other things, and the cumulation of dishes that would grow as research was underway. Margot held some kind of strange, red-ish rock in her palm, that was almost the size of her head; polished on the perpendicular, but rough-hewn as if it had been blown apart from the structure it had been attached to. Considering Margot had been holding while reading through the journal selections that were in Sanskrit, Persephone had to assume that it was a piece of the Tower of Babel. 

"Are you done with the curse stuff?" Margot asked, sounding particularly grumpy. 

"No," Hunter's voice came out somewhere between a petulant whine of defeat and a growl, and Persephone had to bite down on a laugh, "I doubt I'll ever find an end to the curse stuff." From her vantage point, Persephone could just see Hunter's hair, and a sliver of his forehead; all of which promptly disappeared, followed by a crash as Hunter dramatically threw himself to laying on the floor. "We don't know where he was originally cursed--" 

"Sorry, why are we looking into the curse?" Persephone asked. Margot straightened up until Persephone could see her eyes just over the line of the table. 

"Because if we can break the curse, then we can force him out." 

"But in order to break the curse, you kind of need Chace in front you, don't you?" Persephone clarified; her curse-breaking next to non-existent, never mind simply being rusty. 

"Or an item that belonged to him." Hunter supplied, raising a hand in which a time-stiffened medal was clenched, spattered with old blood. 

Persephone hummed, trying to remember the rumours that had floated around the Underworld with every new soul brought there by the Chace family. "We don't know where he was cursed, or who cursed him, but we do know who killed the person laying out the curse. If I could easily talk to Hades, we could probably find out just who laid the curse down and, more than likely, get them to tell us how to break the curse." 

"What about your looking glass, dear?" Olivia asked, bustling in with a ghost-child in her arms and clicking her tongue at Hunter sprawled on the floor dejectedly. 

"It...I had a nightmare. My powers smashed the glass when I woke." Persephone admitted, and the look of sympathetic sorrow on Olivia's features, kept grandmotherly as they prepared for battle, was somehow not a rankle. 

"Looking glass?" Margot asked, perking up. 

"A mirror made for me to be able to talk to and see Hades while I'm topside." Persephone answered. 

"May I take a look at it?" Margot was eager, her huge eyes somehow even larger. 

Persephone had her reservations that it would ever be repairable, but on the same token, Persephone also did not want to part with the pieces. 

"You have a knack for fixing engines, dear: I'm not sure how piecing together a spell like that will go for you." Olivia's voice was kind in its denial, and Persephone's shoulders straightened, her head coming up. 

"You know what, I don't think there's any way it can be fixed, but I'd be grateful to you to give it your best shot." 

Margot's eyes brightened, a look of determination settling into her sharp features. Persephone felt like she knew that the caveat that she didn't think it could be done would only fuel the urge to prove the expectation wrong, and she honestly hoped that Margot would prove to be right. 

Offering Margot a hand up from her position on the floor, Persephone winced in sympathy at the pop and crack of Margot's bones as she stood, the slight unsteadiness telling all anyone need know about the state of bloodflow in her legs. Margot followed obediently to the room Persephone had been given, and as she folded herself onto a seat on the end of Persephone's bed, the goddess had a kernel of worry that this room was not the guest room it appeared to be, but actually Margot's. 

The pieces of the mirror clink slightly as Persephone takes the wrapped bundle of glass from her bag, more mindful of causing any more damage to the mirror than she cared if the shards pierced her skin. "It was forged with water and sand of the Styx, struck by Zeus's master-bolt into becoming glass." 

Margot went so far as to hold her breath as she unwrapped the colourful silk from around the glass. With the glass shattered, and Persephone could only hope that, back in their bedroom in the Underworld, the sister glass was intact; that the connection between the two would not have translated the damage done. Margot carefully picked out the ornate handle of the mirror: the vine of sturdy ivy that Hephaestus had braided and made metal for her too hardy for her to have done any damage to it. 

With a reverent fingertip, Margot traced one of the ivy leaves, her small mouth pursed in thought. "I...Ivy to help bind a marriage." Margot muttered softly, then looked up, "Grams won't let anyone use normal scrying glass because it leaves the user too vulnerable to something clawing its way back. I'll have to do some reading up on it...but I think there might be a way to fix this." 

Persephone hadn't read much on mortal magic as it'd progressed; but she had heard the others in the Underworld talking of new attempts the living made to speak with the dead. Most were, at most, entertaining attempts, and Persephone knew of a few devils that would let themselves be summoned for the fun of the thing; but some, Persephone had heard, were dangerous enough that the souls that the Underworld had claimed could claw their way into a new living body, and leave the soul who'd owned that body in their place among the dead. 

"Is there anything you would need from me?" Persephone asked after a moment of considering. She did not want to go against Olivia in asking this girl to dabble with magics that weren't allowed; but the loss of her looking glass was not something she could countenance.

Margot bit her lip, considering, "I don't think so? But I have to do more reading to be sure. Sorry." 

Persephone raised a hand, "Do not apologize, and take what time you need. If you can fix my looking glass, Margot, you will be owed a favour from the Iron Queen." 

Margot's widened eyes brought a smile to Persephone's lips; the acknowledgement that Margot did know what that meant a good sign, in her estimation. 

"For now, I'm going to return to reading up on Olivia and Hunter's war-years. You can read up on fixing the glass, or you can return to what you've been reading, it's up to you. But thank you, Margot, for bothering to try." 

Margot carefully cradled the fragments into her hands, rising from her perch and carrying the broken mirror with her, further down the hall instead of back towards the nest in Olivia's living room. 

It was a strange adjustment: the way the Sanctuary, from within, seemed to grow or shrink to accommodate its occupants. Logically, Persephone knew that it had that power; but the disconnect between the space of the rooms they were in, and the actual size of the building that they had arrived to last night, was a thought hovering at the back of Persephone's consciousness, ready to trip her up when she was unwary enough to turn her mind to it. 

Olivia was still holding the ghost child in her arms when she came to lean against the bedroom door, "Are you alright, Persephone?" 

The quiet, steady question in some way cut into Persephone; in a way that she hadn't known she could be cut. "I...Better than the others, certainly. Better than you. I'm not facing down having to try to defeat a man I'd thought I'd killed." 

Olivia's thin lips twitched, but the smile was clear in her eyes as she moved into the room. "I... _hoped_ that the grenade had killed that fucker...but I could not believe it. Not truly. Not for someone as...evil as Viktor Chace was. It felt too easy, even if it nearly cost Hunter his life. A stain on the world as stubborn as that isn't erased with something so simple as being rendered to pink mist." 

Persephone snorted, shaking her head. "From the stories of the dead that have been brought down by Viktor Chace, I think I very much would have liked to have been there to see that happen, even despite its ineffectiveness." 

Olivia's smile was bloodthirsty, "Oh, my queen...you have no idea." 

The child in Olivia's arms perked up, twisting towards the front door. With a curious head-tilt, the child vanished in a wink, and Olivia frowned, turning to head towards the apparent cause for the disappearance. 

"Grams...?" Hunter and Margot called in unison, and Persephone watched as Olivia's appearance changed with her demeanour; her hair turning to a lustrous blonde instead of the white-blonde it hovered on the edges between, her skin growing youthful and gaining a deep bronze of one who spent time in the sunshine, her back straightening as her legs grew longer, and her stride gained the gravitas of a warrior queen. 

The front door opened, and if Persephone were not the queen of the dead, she would not have been able to see the ghost-children that had opened it for their caretaker. 

When Persephone caught sight of the person standing on the other side of the door, she stopped dead in Olivia's wake, a flash of panic yanking at her insides. "Hello, Ares." 

The Greek god of war had done himself injury from the latest innovations in his machinations; Persephone hadn't been lying to Cora about that. But there had always been something indefinable about Ares...something that spoke to the deepest parts of one's mind, whispering a threat that was unnameable and unknowable, and would swallow everything whole. 

"Olivia, it's good to see you." It had always unsettled Persephone to the extreme, that Ares could transmute the threat that he exuded into being something very nearly...seductive. 

Persephone startled slightly as a warm hand braced her arm, Hunter's dark eyes looking not at the god of war, but at her, and the understanding within them indicated that Hunter knew something that even Persephone did not, about why it was the Iron Queen always faltered in the face of Ares. Hunter led her with a firm hand, disappearing back into the bowels of the house and down the corridor towards the room Margot had vanished into, leaving Olivia to face Ares by herself.

"I hate him." Persephone choked out the words, "I would like nothing more than to kill him--" 

"Personally," Hunter cut in, saving her from the admittance that she could never force herself to show the hatred she had past the fear strangling it out of her, "I would rather like to see Ares drawn and quartered." 

"Slow-roasted alive," Margot chirped from the desk she sat at, the cheer disturbing when taken into account against the calculative bloodlust in her eyes when she turned to look at them. "He's a god, so technically he wouldn't be able to die while in any of these manners, right? We could actually get around to doing everything we could think of?" 

"You're vicious. I like you." Persephone laughed. 

Hunter's head snapped around to the door just before Persephone and Margot registered Olivia's raised voice, and he took off back through the door just as a shockwave rocked through the old house. The distressed cries of children rent through Persephone and Margot grabbed her wrist, pulling her back through the hall, though not towards Olivia, Hunter and Ares; but towards the back of the house and the apothecary-schoolroom that they stumbled into there. 

"Mar!" a cry went up among the children hunkering in haphazard organization, and Margot smiled, heading for the only one who was silent and plucking him up into her arms. 

Persephone kept one foot on either side of the threshold as Margot's presence gathered the children around her in a tight bundle. Persephone did not need to be armed to be dangerous, and Ares would know that well enough, so the house's geography shifted so that she could watch what was happening down a long hallway, the clear line of sight only there, Persephone could somehow sense, until the Sanctuary had truly been breached. Should that happen, Persephone could easily see the wards written into the very walls to turn this house into a labyrinth to protect its occupants, and could feel the rising chill of the ghost-children gathering and flickering angrily into view around their keeper where she faced down the god of war. 

Hunter, Persephone realized, was nowhere to be seen, and that only sat wrongly for a second before the delicate glass doors to the back yard unlocked themselves, and the scent of roses and seawater reached Persephone on a surprisingly warm wind. 

"Come," Aphrodite beckoned from the other side of the door, "Hunter's coming with the god-killer; the Sanctuary will be fine. You needn't sit here in fear." 

Beside Aphrodite, a strange wind picked up, the form within it flowing like sand from the high, imperial features of the true Morrigan, into the childlike features of Badb in her form as warrior, before settling into the fine-featured aspect of Macha, the protector goddess of women and children in war. 

Margot didn't budge an inch, her eyes bright and calculating. 

"The story of Ares and Aphrodite isn't true." Persephone spoke up, "Aphrodite hates Ares about as much as I do." Persephone stepped into the apothecary fully, and behind her, the house shifted, the straight shot of sight that she'd been granted twisting away until there was only the gold-coloured wallpaper in easy view of the door no matter what direction you looked. 

"No offense, dear, but I'd assert that I hate him more than you do." Aphrodite growled. 

Persephone grinned, lifting Margot out of the crowd of children, the group of them obediently stepping out of the house, though none of them relaxed an inch. Margot's grey-blue eyes settled on Macha and didn't leave, the pinch of her mouth telegraphing distrust. 

"You're a facet of the Morrigan. Trystin's mother." Margot's voice was dangerous and cold, and Persephone felt a tiny thrill at her fearlessness in staring down a god. 

A pained look crossed over Macha's features, then a flash of the crone-like Nemain--the third aspect of the Morrigan--stole over her features before the settled back to the placid calm of Macha once more. "No. Badb was...Badb was the mother. She is an aspect of me, but I cannot control what she does any more than I could control what you do." 

Margot's pale features did not lose an inch of their marble chill, "I ask as a devotee of Artemis, sworn protector of women and children: do you come to help us?" 

Persephone heard the undertow of magic in the question, feel the whisper-wind tease of Artemis's magic swirl around them: if Macha lied, as an equal goddess of protection, Artemis would be drawn here, and would either be given the truth, or take the weight of the lie out of Macha's hide. 

"You're daring. I like you." Aphrodite sounded gleeful, and Persephone bit back the same sentiment. 

"I am here to hinder Ares's reclamation of Trystin Ó Faolían, nothing more. My... _sisters_ ," that was not the right way to think of Badb and Nemain, but it was as close as most mortals could get, "don't have to care about the damage he could cause if his father were to wield him--" 

Out of the corner of her eye, Persephone could see the ghost of Cora appear in the confines of the glass doors they'd spilled out through, looking like she was mid-fight as her incorporeal hands slammed against the glass, trying to garner attention; trying to relay a warning. 

"That's a lie." Persephone murmured, and Kifo began to slither beneath her skin, the assertion bringing forth Badb's glaring features, and Persephone knew she was right. "Forgive me, I misspoke: That's not _quite_ a lie, you are here with the aim of hindering Ares, but you're also here to make sure we don't find Trystin, either, aren't you?" 

In a flash of moonlight, a bow was in Margot's hand, an arrow nocked and aimed for the three-faced goddess. "A goddess-protector of children who would--" 

"Who would rather her son be trapped, safe, than become the end of this precious world you inhabit." Badb sneered. She looked no older than twelve, her features not yet finely formed. Persephone had limited experience with children, but she got the sense that the look of bloodlust in the girl's eyes would not be unthinkable, to be worn by a girl who's witnessed the atrocities of war. "Because that's what he would be. The end of this world that you've all worked so hard to keep safe." 

"Only if he chose that path." One of the children spoke up from behind Margot's legs, looking distant even as the words came forth with absolute certainty. "There's another path he can choose, but it would be the end of the world as _you_ know it." 

Margot's mouth twitched with a smirk, "Michael?" 

The child flinched hard when Badb bared her teeth in a snarl, but a girl no older than six leveled a glare at her so scalding that the air actually began to warp with the heat. "She...she doesn't know where Trystin is, but that it’s in Greece. Or was in Greece." Michael narrowed his eyes, and blood slowly began to flow from his nose as he visibly put every bit of concentration on Badb he could. 

She shifted from Badb to Nemain to Macha, not settling on a form, and Persephone reached out to the boy to stop him from whatever he was doing, a sense of urgency in her bones. He nearly collapsed under her touch, and two more children behind him clapped their hands hard together, a shockwave of a force-field expanding from their joined hands and sending the Morrigan flying. 

"And what of you?" Persephone asked Aphrodite as she lifted Michael into her arms, carefully wiping away the blood. 

"You brought a wolf trying to pass itself off as a sheep-dog--" Margot grit, but Aphrodite raised her hands placatingly. 

"I did not bring her. The Celts don't like us being on their turf, Persephone." 

"True…for gods like you.” Persephone considered Aphrodite, her gaze sweeping up and down. The gauzy white toga-like gown that Aphrodite wore was overlapped with a coat that looked to be made of silver and pearls, and Persephone felt a twist of dread knowing that that outfit likely meant that Aphrodite had been rousted from her happy home with her husband in order to go to Mount Olympus. "Why are you here?" 

"You know why." Aphrodite sighed. "I'm here because Zeus figured you'd listen to me before you'd ever react well to Hermes, and you need to placate your mother. When I got to Olympus and Ares wasn't to be seen, I knew he'd come here while we'd be busy." 

"Do you know what he thinks he can do on the grounds of the Sanctuary?" 

Aphrodite's violet eyes swept over Margot, her amusement a lovely compliment to her true, fae features, "What do _you_ think you can do on the grounds of the Sanctuary, little devotee of the hunt?" 

"I'm one of the sworn protectors of the children. I can do anything I want against a threat to them. I wouldn't recommend testing my patience about it." 

Persephone was suddenly very disappointed that Margot was already a devotee of Artemis and couldn't be brought into Persephone's own fold. "Ares is...more balls than brains, let's say. He's like Badb: all bloodlust, little more than the thought 'punch that' to incite the violence, and absolutely no thought to the consequences." Persephone did not doubt for a moment that everyone, down to the four-year-old floating three inches off the ground with the excitement going on, knew that. "He thinks he can muscle his way through the Sanctuary's guards against violence in its walls."

Persephone snorted, "He may have had a nice, big war not too long ago, Aphrodite, but we both know his devotees are few and far between: he can't have that kind of power." 

Aphrodite's eyes flashed, and cold dread stole the breath from Persephone's lungs. "Not if the second war he's aiming for comes to fruition, Persephone. You and I both know that so-called peace treaties aren't likely to stem the rising tide of aggression." 

Margot's eyes were burning with rage: the knowledge of how true that assertion was aging her well beyond her years. She released the tension on her bow without firing, and beside them, the Sanctuary shuddered. It was only a moment before Olivia and Hunter stepped out, both of them looking more tired than Persephone had hoped they would. "Aphrodite," Olivia greeted cordially, but with none of the gravitas that she had shown Persephone just the night before. 

"Grams." Aphrodite smiled, "Hunter, it's good to see you again." 

Persephone had heard about Hunter's apprenticeship with Hephaestus just two years ago; learning from a smith-god how to wend metal and magic together. Hunter's earning of Hephaestus's trust had been a shock; that Hephaestus trusted him far enough to allow him access to a god-killing weapon had had the hackles rising around Mount Olympus. Casting her gaze over Hunter now, Persephone realized that there was a slight disconnect from what she could see of him, and what was truly there--a glamour put in place to hide that Hunter was still armed to the teeth with something that could kill even an immortal. 

"Always a pleasure, Dite." Hunter's mouth twitched up into a smile, the incline of his head respectful enough. Hunter flexed his right hand, and the glamour--whatever the glamour was hiding--disappeared. "Margot?" 

"The Morrigan showed up the same time Aphrodite did." Persephone informed on a sigh, trying and failing to properly analyze what she felt of the danger Hunter posed. "She wants to hinder Ares from finding their son." 

"But she also wants to hinder us." Margot sighed, passing a hand through her hair once the bow had vanished much the same way it had appeared. 

Olivia drew herself up, looking at each of them in turn. She had shifted back to the form of the kindly old woman that would better be thought of as Grams, but Persephone could see a glint of gold like catching embers in her eyes as they passed over the adults of the group. "Phoebe," she called, and a little girl under a cloud of frizzy brown hair stepped forward, "we need counsel. Feel up to it?" 

Hunter huffed a laugh, shaking his head, and Margot and he shared a look as they moved towards a patio set that was fit for a grand house, incongruous sitting in the garden of a lighthouse keeper. 

"What are we being counselled on?" Persephone asked reticently, hovering over the seat indicated. Olivia sat with a small groan of weariness, but accepted Phoebe into her arms and onto her lap easily. 

"If Ares stirs up another war, he'll want his greatest weapon back by his side. Trystin was raised by his father, after a fashion. Can you tell me with certainty that if we release him, Trystin will not choose to go back to the life he knew before his sister was slaughtered, and he and his lover were trapped in the dark?" Aphrodite asked, and everyone around the table stiffened. Casting her violet eyes around the assembly, Aphrodite let out a small sigh, "I was there...I was there, when it happened. I remember it vividly.

"Cora's murder was bait. Trystin had to be lured away from the tidy, simple life that Cora had managed to give him, breaking up the iron rules of warlords so that peace had a chance. He was always a weapon. In Cora's hands, he was one wielded for good. In Ares's, Cora knew he could bring down the world." As the others watched, Aphrodite's shoulders began to slump slightly under the weight of remembering, "I don't know how or why Cora was lured to Greece: if she went knowing what her fate would be. But Trystin knew, the moment she died, and he could not be dissuaded from trying to find whoever did it."

"He wanted justice for his family." 

A ghost of a smile touched Aphrodite's lips, "I don't know if it was justice, or if it was revenge, that he wanted more. But when he reached Greece, instead, he found love." Aphrodite met Hunter's eyes, "It was very little to do with my brand of love. There was no...no slow pull, no coax and ultimate fall. Trystin met the other half of himself, and was gone, all at once. 

"The boy was from Ireland--would not have even been in Greece, but for poor timing: Tyrstin had killed the warlord that had sold the boy into slavery only a fortnight after the act had been done. And, in those days, the boy could either be a slave, or be a soldier. Trystin had no money, no standing...his powers were diminished because he was a god with few believers, and no Parthenon from which to call power. But what he could do...was ask Hephaestus to forge a ring, and pour what power he had into it, so that the boy he loved could wear it, and be protected by the power and strength of the god of wolves." 

It was easy to imagine: Persephone knew enough about the drama Ares had been regularly stirring up between Aphrodite, Hephaestus, and himself that she could easily see the godling being granted that much of a boon, if only to spite Ares. She could even imagine Aphrodite being intrigued by the godling and the love he'd fallen into, and coming along for the ride. 

"They were caught...It was the oddest thing: watching the general label them criminals, rather than using them to try to further his own ends. He took the ring, of course...but instead of keeping a warrior god, he sentenced them both to imprisonment. In a city beneath a city, one which had been poisoned ages before, Trystin and his lover were locked up: Trystin trapped in chains that not even a god could break, and his lover infected with a fever and sent stumbling alone, through a city of the dead, in the utter dark." 

Margot wasn't breathing; but Hunter's gaze had gone so distant that Persephone wasn't sure he could even hear the story anymore. 

"The general was a favourite of Ares's; I couldn't help Trystin without inciting a war among the gods. And, really, Hunter...what would you do, if you'd been left chained apart from the person you loved enough to risk everything for; listening to him driven mad and beyond suffering, and unable to do a thing about it? Could you still choose a righteous path, or would anger be all you knew?" 

The child straightened in Olivia's lap, her eyes on Hunter, too. "This isn't about righteousness." Hunter managed, "And it's not about preventing another war." Hunter's eyes were dark and desolate when they raised to meet Olivia's cool gaze, "Who's to say that preventing another war would be the righteous path...Trystin deserves to be released from that hell, because he never deserved to be put in it." Hunter's jaw worked, and he swallowed heavily, "And the general that took his ring...that was a man who would come to be known as Viktor Chace, isn't it? The ring is part of the reason he's managed to slither out of the limbo that the curse was meant to put him into?" 

Phoebe nodded gravely in Olivia's lap, and Aphrodite took a slow breath, pressing her mouth into a thin line, frowning. "I can't tell you where the city is anymore. I tried for decades to make sure I'd remember...so that when the time came, I could lead the person who could get him out back to him--but I lost track at some point, and I can’t find it again. What I can tell you...is that the river that was poisoned, that made it a city of the dead instead of the safe haven it was meant to be? That river collected magic. I don't know if it still does. I don't know why it used to. But it's part of the reason why the city beneath the city was never touched again: why it was labeled so easily as a cursed place. Because the order of nature was twisted at its very gates." 

"If we can trace a concentration of magic, we might be able to find it." Margot reasoned, eyes bright. 

Persephone had not taken her eyes off the child in Olivia's grasp, and it only then hit her what the child had the gift of: she was a pathfinder. She could see clear the way to go, and guide those around her surely enough that she didn't even have to speak; they knew. 

Phoebe's eyes turned to Persephone as if sensing her gaze, and Persephone's heart felt like it'd been gripped by talons in her chest, the air not reaching her lungs even as she tried to drag it in. 

The Iron Queen could not go with the party chasing after Viktor Chace and his ancient victim. There was an answer to a deeper question that she had to find before she could, asked in the child's strange golden eyes. _What makes a god? And can a god be unmade?_

Out of the corner of her eye, Persephone caught the flicker of flame, and her lungs constricted as if the air she breathed--the air she didn't need in order to survive--was enough to truly kill her. 

As, she was beginning to suspect, it had killed her once before.


	7. Chapter 7

Lina knew Hunter's tricks all too well not to immediately know there was something wrong when she woke to a coffee tray at the ready, and Hunter's silent presence bundled haphazardly into a chair by the bed.

"Tell me you don't have to do this one. That we can call in someone who owes us a favour, and be free of it." Lina ordered, sitting up with less pain than she expected. She wrapped a hand around a flagon of coffee, unwavering as Hunter's eyes ducked, his mouth pulling into a tight line. 

"I don't think there's anyone on this planet that owes us something so large as this, Lina." Hunter managed. Lina dragged in a slow sigh, and nodded after a beat. 

"Then tell me that you're going to go as far as you can, and if it's not far enough, then we're going to stop." Lina didn't know precisely why it was for this that she felt like they were on a precipice. Even for how scared she was of the ramifications of Hunter facing down Viktor Chace, there was a part of her that looked at it as an opportunity for catharsis. But there was no denying that she was afraid, now: no way for her to justify not being afraid when things felt this momentous. 

Hunter's eyes were haunted in a way Lina had only ever caught the barest glimpses of: the set of his features like marble before he licked his lips, took a breath, and met her gaze again, "I have to tell you a story, Lina. And you're not going to like it. But I need you to stay with me past the end of it." 

Lina drew in a sharp breath, but nodded. 

"The...the stories of past-lives that we've heard before? It's hard for me to know for sure...but I'm beginning to think I remember mine." Hunter looked down at the flowers embroidered on the bedspread as if they held the answers he'd been looking for. "It's always been said that I have an old soul, Lina. It's not a lie. I've been dreaming of something that happened centuries ago, and Aphrodite just confirmed it for me. 

"I was under the...leadership of Viktor Chace long before he adopted that name. It was the same man, I know that much now. And he was a devotee of war, Lina. In a way that I cannot properly put words to, because I don't think that anyone with a scrap of humanity can fully comprehend." Lina shivered, drawing her bedclothes further around her at the recitation of Hunter's voice, gone distant now in memory. "He was a monster for the sake of being monstrous, Lina. A thing of absolute horror. He tore apart every village he came across, and rent it to ash so that nothing could return in his wake. But he collected...People. Slaves, some. But some were...were just children. Children that he could make into monsters like him." 

That the supernatural hunters were known as the Chace "family" cast a new light now, and Lina felt bile dragging slow claws at the back of her throat as Hunter continued, "I remember...being taken from my home by him and his men. I was given a choice: I could be made a slave, or I could be made a soldier. There was a war brewing, because there was always a war brewing with a man like Viktor leading an army, so they needed the bodies. And I...I met Trystin. A god of wolves. A walking weapon. And he would protect me better, we thought, as a soldier, than he could protect me as a slave.

"I can't explain what it was like, Lina. I don't know if there are words for what it was, to find Trystin. There's no logic, no reasoning. I saw him...and I knew. It was him. It'd always been him. It always would be him." Lina didn't know how Hunter held steady, his eyes still gone distant; his voice level and measured. "Trystin poured as much power as he could into a ring that he gave me. Not enough to make me immortal, because he was only just immortal himself, with the belief of the people he and his sister had spent decades saving. But enough to make me strong. Fast. Cunning." 

"As if you weren't all those things already." Lina didn't know where she managed to summon the tease from, but the ghost of a smile that crossed Hunter's mouth was worth the effort of it. 

"Two years later, I was close to winning my freedom. Would be given the choice to try to make my way in the world, or to stay with the soldiers and...earn my living. For most, they'd been dragged so far from their homes that there wasn't much point in trying to go back to them, so being a soldier was the smarter route. But if we could make it until my freedom was secured, Trystin had a home I could return with him to. We could be happy together. Stopping the kinds of monsters that did to my village from doing the same to others." Hunter swallowed thickly. "Trystin was lured to meet me, and me to meet him--that much I came to realize when we were locked up and charged with heresy and treason...or as close to those as they got then. Viktor took the ring from my finger--took my finger in its entirety. Wanted me to scream and suffer in order to torture Trystin; because Trystin had grown up in brutality and torture, and they couldn't crack him, Ares had long made sure of that. 

"I refused to give the satisfaction. So Viktor infected me with...with something. Some fever, and I think a hallucinogen. And he had us locked in a city of the dead, separated by a gate that would only open when my heart stopped...and locked behind a gate that would only open with the application of my living blood." Hunter looked at Lina, so pale that if it weren't for the colour in his irises, she would have been able to mistake him for one of the ghosts haunting this house. "We have to get him out, Lina. We have to make him whole. Strip Viktor of the power he stole, and let the curse work properly. I couldn't find what curse it was because all the curses I found were to trap a man in a limbo of his own devising: a repetitive hell from which there would be no escape, where at least Hell would give you a chance to be redeemed. It's Trystin's powers that have given him the leeway to keep from his limbo...I'm sure of it." 

Hunter subsided, drawing into himself a little more, and Lina let out a shaking breath, "You're right. I don't like that story, Hunter." Lina breathed, "I particularly don't like the implication that in order to save Trystin, we'd first have to kill you." 

"I...I'm not sure my blood will work on the first gate--" 

"Liar." Lina replied. "You know as well as I do that if you're carrying that...then there's little chance you aren't the one that's meant to do this." Lina pulled her knees to her chest, resting her chin against them and staring at her partner in crime with luminous eyes, "You've always loved him. You claimed that it was me...but it wasn't. I was just the closest you got to the love you felt when you remembered what it was like to love him, wasn't I?" 

"I'm sorry." Hunter ground out, voice splintered like broken crystal. 

Lina smiled a sad half-smile, "Don't be, Hunt. You and I have always loved each other in our ways. Nothing will change that." 

"Will you help me?" 

"I want the records of what this was...what it is, as much as we can get them. I don't care if we have to scry through the entire Underworld to do it: I want to know if it could be as simple as you opening the gate, and not stepping through, so that your heart is not beating within the confines of the city. I won't say that I won't do everything in my power to save Trystin from this fate he's been trapped in: but it's not in my power to lose you, Hunter. Not now. We have a long ride to go yet." 

Hunter nodded, relaxing, but not completely. Lina took up her flagon of coffee, and Hunter flicked his fingers towards it, the stoneware warming in her hands and a curl of steam rising from the coffee once more. 

"What else did I miss while I was asleep?" Lina asked, shifting so that she sat cross-legged, the chill that had stolen over her not-so-subtly chased away at the flare of fire magic Hunter had thrown her way. 

"Ares came to...I think he wants in part to piggyback off our searching, and in part to maybe try to get us to stop. If he can't find and free Trystin; can't try to claim his weapon back, then we can't, either." 

Lina let her moue of distaste flash before she took another pull from the mug, "He's not some weapon to be claimed--" 

"Not practically or literally, but I think that if he were to actually be brought to arms to either bring peace or to go to war..." Hunter winced, hissing slightly through his teeth as he did. "And Aphrodite is worried. Ares is dredging up another war already...and Hephaestus isn't coping well. Ptah and Gibil largely took over the job of smithing the weapons of war from thought and fire...but Hephaestus saw something in their workshops that has sent him reeling, Aphrodite says." 

"Shit." Lina growled, and was tired enough that her magic sparked from her, the lightbulb shattering in the desk lamp on the other side of the room. 

"Quite." Hunter sighed, steepling his fingers and leaning back in the chair to rest his crossed ankles on the edge of the bed. "My current plan of attack is to keep here until we know where it is we're going. Trystin is...Trystin was a good man. But I can't even tell you how long ago those memories are, and he's spent all that time alone, in the dark, with the memory of the deaths of two of the people he loved most and little if anything else. I don't want him to fall into Ares's hands. We can't let any humanity he has left be lost to that." 

The quiet note of pleading had Lina's resolve growing. But she also knew Hunter Dyan far too well, "If there isn't a way for you to simply not stand in that city with your still-beating heart...you're going to do this anyway, aren't you? Even if you have to do it alone." 

"I don't know if Trystin will be the same man he was. I don't know if I am the same man I was. If it was...I don't know. If it would have held true past him saving me as he was then. The only thing I can tell you, Lina, is that that man does not deserve the hell that he has been put through. And if it's the last thing I do, I will save him from it." 

"Would he want you to? At the expense of your life?" Lina asked softly. 

Hunter ducked his gaze to the bedspread again, "He told me to leave him in the dark. I was infected, but I wasn't so far gone as to not be able to open the gates to the city and try to find a healer--someone to help. I couldn't fathom leaving him, and it turned into, when the fever really took hold, screaming to try to find him in the dark. I know that staying--that staying broke him, in ways that nothing else could. I put him through the worst of it. And have left him trapped alone with those memories." 

"You wanted to save him then." Lina reasoned, her brow furrowing. 

"I opened the gate, and returned to him. Told him that as soon as my heart stopped, he'd be free. I was so far gone by then...finding my way through the city was nigh impossible, and I broke my arm doing it. It was only then I found out that they'd chained him in that cell as well: that that was why he wasn't able to reach through the bars of his prison and touch me. I begged him to when he couldn't talk to let me know he was there. He fought tooth and nail to try to break free...but he couldn't. He talked to me until he couldn't speak anymore; and in my haze, I was alone in the dark, screaming for him." 

The cold stole over Lina again, and she shuddered hard enough that Hunter's whole palm flared with the fire-magic to warm her again. The magic didn't require it, of course, but Hunter focused slightly, and a lick of flame began to dance over his raised palm. It was a parlour trick Hunter had taken to using to calm scared children any time they came across them, and Lina had to admit, albeit grudgingly, that it rather worked on her, too. The dance and flicker of the flame held safe and steady in Hunter's hand managed to exorcise a little of the horror that Lina's mind had conjured visions to go with Hunter's words for. 

"I won't say whether stopping my heart to get him out of that cage will be enough to affect him at all, after all he's been through. It won't help, surely...but you and I both know well, Lina, that a stopped heart can be restarted if you go about it the right way." 

Lina heaved a sigh, not in the least mollified that Hunter possibly had something that vaguely could be mistaken for a plan, "You are my least-favourite person. I don't know why I put up with you." 

Hunter laughed, delighted, "Because, my dear, you are enamoured with kicking my ass." 

"And what does Grams have to say to this madness?" Lina asked, gaze sharp. 

"I wanted to tell you before I told her. Believe it or not, you're the harder sell." 

"I don't believe it for a second. You're pinning stopping Viktor to finding Trystin and restoring his power, darling. But when Grams finds out what you expect it to cost to find Trystin and restore him, she's going to find a way to burn Viktor to the ground, and wrap you in cottonwool while she does it." 

Hunter's brows ticked up, "You say that as if tying saving Trystin to stopping Viktor isn't the obvious answer. You'd rather break the curse on Viktor and scramble to try to exorcise him than fix what went wrong with the curse and leave it to do its work?" 

Lina winced. "Okay, no. But the fact remains, love: we won't let you give your life for this. Not even with a half-assed way to bring you back." 

The luminous quality to Hunter's gaze should have tipped Lina off then: Hunter was always the man with the plan, and this would be no different--to think for a moment that there was anything half-assed about it was a mistake she should have known better than to make. 

"What are you planning, Hunt?" 

"If I told you it was nothing you needed to worry about, it would just make you worry more." 

"So tell me what it is you're planning." Lina ordered, voice deadly-level. 

Hunter quirked a smile, leaning forward to peck a kiss to her forehead. "Can't." 

Lina resisted the urge to grab his arm, keep him there, and get the answers out of him in any way she could—but she knew that that wouldn't work. 

He slid from the room, and Lina decided that wallowing would be her best course of action, at least for a little while. 

The loss of her lover should be upsetting her more than it did, Lina knew; she'd spent the last four years trying to convince herself that it felt good to have her true love. 

But hearing Hunter talk about the dreaming memory of Trystin, Lina knew there was an absence that went too deep to be something she should have been making herself live with. Really looking at it, she wasn't sure if she'd loved him, or if it'd been the work of the idol, convincing her that she should. 

Lina knew that that was what Hunter had hated most about their adventure for that idol: and it made her wonder if, perhaps, Hunter had been having similar doubts. Was it Hunter Dyan that would love Trystin, or was it the reincarnation of the man he'd once been? Was there a difference? 

Lina closed her eyes, the grit of them usual enough, given how much magic she'd used.   
The hangover from magical overload was somehow much worse than any other kind of hangover Lina had ever had, but this particularly one was actually not the worst she'd been subjected to, and if for nothing else besides the perspective, Lina was thankful to have been gotten champagne-drunk by her godly lover after she'd managed to mostly-accidentally incinerate sixteen mummies of Romans buried with Egyptian rites to ash when they'd tried to steal the lives of the excavation crew Hunter and Lina had been called in to protect. 

As Lina made her way down the stairs of the Sanctuary two hours after waking, she only moderately felt like she'd been both dropped from a great enough height to have frozen in the falling, and like she'd been half-dragged over hot coals face-first afterwards. 

Hunter had summarily been banished to his own bed; and Lina wasn't surprised, really, to have learned that Hunter was having trouble sleeping--particularly with the chase they were on now. 

Letting out a hard shiver that seemed to rattle her throbbing brain, Lina met the expectant gaze of Grams and managed the barest ghost of a smile for the old woman. 

Grams had shifted since Lina had last seen her: instead of the kindly old woman, there was something inherently imperious about the cut of her features. "You're on your feet. I wouldn't have been." Olivia noted, leaning against the wall at the base of the stairs Lina was slowly dragging herself down. 

"I'm a glutton for punishment, I'm told. I learned it from Hunter." 

Snorting, Olivia rolled her eyes, the irises shifting from the grey-blue to a strange, inhuman gold. "If you were a glutton for punishment, Lina, you wouldn't have told Hunter that he needs to tell me he expects to die on this foray into madness." 

Lina's crumpled features of confusion only moderately sent knives through her tender head. 

"I don't need him to tell me." Olivia's eyes shifted to grey once more as she gave Lina a meaningful look, "He talks in his sleep, after all. Even if it's in Gaelic." 

Lina's breath caught, "You knew that he...remembered." 

"I knew that he was seeing something that I couldn't explain. The look on his face when Aphrodite recounted what she'd witnessed of Trystin's downfall? That was enough confirmation for the rest." Looking grim, Olivia tucked her arm in Lina's as if she knew Lina needed bearing up, and guided her towards the kitchen.

"I refuse to let him continue without confirmation that his heart actually has to stop in order to free Trystin." Lina asserted, and Olivia made a sound--not quite a snort--that was eloquent in her belief that that would prove to do anything at all. 

"Persephone is plotting to go try to find some answers, and I think there may be a way of pinpointing exactly where this thing is." Olivia's lips pursed, and Lina's mind swirled uneasily as she realized that as they'd walked, Olivia had grown younger in appearance; now a thirty-something woman standing before her, beautiful as a sunrise. "So we may have a lead to find the prison, at least. But delaying finding and freeing Trystin will only work for so long before Hunter will slip both our grasps and go about this on his own, whether he has a way out or not."

It was Lina's turn to look grim. "I know. Price of traveling with a hero: you always have to worry about what stupid way they'll throw their life away next." 

Olivia barked a laugh, and as Lina was gently set into a seat near the stove, the scent of a peat-fire pleasant with the scents of stew and baking bread, she could appreciate the fluidity of the woman who could move in mayhem and horror, and still be the closest figure Lina had ever even bourn witness to being a mother. 

"Hunter thinks that the only way to stop Chace is to release Trystin; and he isn't quite wrong. But I need to hear that it's worth it...from someone who _knows_. Hunter doesn't speak of the war. I don't push it, I hold him too dear. But you...I'm sorry, but I have to admit, I am not as beholden by you as I am by him." 

Olivia sighed, stirring idly at a beef stew gently simmering away on the hob. "You know the shape of it. I don't think there's a woman your age who hasn't had to bear witness in some form to the fallout. But the conclusion that Hunter's drawn? That it would be worth his life to make sure Viktor Chace does not claw his way back from the dead?" Olivia took a long, shaking breath, "I can't say that he's wrong. The atrocities that that man committed, Lina--they were beyond the pale. And if Aphrodite is right about what is happening with the smith-gods; what the next war weapon will be...The Keeper of the Sanctuary would tell you that there is no price too steep to keep that man from those kinds of weapons. And I wish I could separate the Keeper from Olivia Owens, my dear, and tell you that I will not let Hunter risk his life if it comes to it. But I can't say for certain. Not when I know what that monster is capable of." 

Lina kept her gaze on Olivia, waiting, and when she didn't relent; didn't ask outright, Olivia sighed, "Did Hunter tell you what happened leading into the time he ended up lobbing a grenade back at his commanding officer?" 

"No." Lina replied. Hunter had told her that it was a matter of either killing the man or being killed; that Hunter hadn't even been investigated for his actions, because the upper brass knew that Viktor Chace was a monster. 

"Hunter is a good man. But he worked very hard to put Chace under the impression that he was only a good soldier. If he was obedient most of the time, then it made his disobedience harder to prove. It was always little things that Hunter sabotaged, but even when I thought they were inconsequential, they somehow proved to mean much more than even Chace had expected them to. Chace didn't trust Hunter. Not really: couldn't, because Hunter, for all he can seem like a mundane mortal, has more power than I would wager any of us realize." Olivia sighed, sliding Lina a steaming cup of tea and settling across from her with her own. "But Hunter has a way with being innocuous, as you well know." 

Lina took a swill of tea, and nearly choked as the whiskey Olivia had spiked it with punched her in the throat. 

"Chace saw those camps like the one we sprang Margot from...and was planning to create something similar for his own. Most of the top-brass...they feared things like us, enough that in taking out Chace, we took out their illusion of protection. Which came in handy when Hunter learned that Chace was having a compound built to try better try to drain a supernatural creature of their powers...for use for humans, and then snapped." 

Lina blinked, trying to think of what it would look like. Hunter, who held steady as if his unsteadiness had been beaten out of him long ago; suddenly snapping, to the point where Viktor Chace tried to kill him, and Hunter, without even using magic, blew him up. 

Lina didn't say a word, still watching; still waiting. "Hunter has problems with thinking he will be abandoned," Olivia started again at last, "he will take care of those around him to the hilt--will never leave a soul behind..." 

"But when it comes to his own soul, he's...less than careful." Lina finished. "His nightmares...when he has them...he begs to be left behind so that whoever is there in the nightmare with him will survive." 

"Chace...instilled a great many fears in a great many of us, Lina, but the one he tried to break each of us with was that the world would truly be better off without us, and there was not a soul among us who was ever worth going back for or trying to save." 

Lina felt bile at the back of her throat, and the burn from the whiskey only made it that much worse. "You know me too well for me to tell you I'm a pacifist. But I think we can agree that if there was a chance for me to _slaughter_ one thing; it would be Viktor Chace, for that alone." 

"So you see...I can't tell you I wouldn't let Hunter sacrifice himself to stop that man, as much as I ache to, Lina. I have to keep the balance in mind: if I were to try to keep Hunter, and the consequence would be that monster managing to come back from the dead? Untold lives would be lost." 

Lowering her gaze to stare through the cooled tea, Lina couldn't agree with her; but she couldn't contradict her, either. 

"Do you know why, after all of that, he chose this life, with you?" Olivia asked, pausing to fix Lina with her storm-grey gaze. 

Lina's reflexive response, that Hunter was in love with her, shriveled on the tip of her tongue now; knowing that he did love her, but he wasn't in love with her. When she actually thought about it, though; did his loving her actually make a difference as to why a man who'd already been through so much was willing to walk with her through even more? She blinked at Olivia, curious, and Olivia gave a small, kind smile. 

"For all that he is a hero, I've known many heroes to choose to leave the path of heroism they were set on; to settle into lives that won't hold memory of how much they would have given to make the world a better place. Complacency is, arguably, a worse fate for the world than it would be to lose the people who want to make change. But it costs too much; is too heavy to carry. Unless there's someone who will be a grounding wire. Someone who can even it out, and lessen the load. You, my dear, have just enough selfishness that you've taught him not to compromise his boundaries of what he can and should do. You won't let him get lost in being a hero, because you don't think he needs to be one. He just needs to be Hunter, and you two'll do what you do; and if you fail, then you move on." 

Lina almost said that they hadn't failed together, not once--but that wasn't quite true. They had hit obstacles that they could not get over, just the two of them. And because of who they had started out as; because of the endless list of souls they had helped, they had been able to call for reinforcements to overcome whatever had threatened to stop them cold on their own. 

The consideration of who they had helped and how they had helped them teased something at the back of Lina's mind: the possibilities of whether they could parlay a favour owed into saving Hunter's life a shade too desperate in clouding Lina's mind for her to be able to grasp one answer over another. 

Hunter had told her that there was no one in the world who owed them a big enough favour to stop this at its root. 

The consideration of whether calling in all of their favours would be enough to be getting on with, Lina took a slow breath, regret clawing behind her sternum. They were owed a lot by a lot of people; but it was very true that the only way to stop Chace for certain would be to let the curse do its job. And even if they could have called in all their favours to stop the man, Hunter knew that Trystin was out there; knew that he was in need. Even without the added complication of true love to deal with. 

"You need to eat something. What do you think you can handle right now?" Olivia asked gently, her understanding tone twitching a smile to Lina's lips. 

"Honestly, with the whiskey, I'm not actually feeling all that awful anymore." 

"That's not the whiskey; I only gave you whiskey because it masks the taste of the tea." 

Lina pulled a face, immediately knowing exactly which tea Olivia was referencing, "Hunter always told me that he couldn't dilute the tea and have it work as well." 

Olivia visibly bit back a laugh, "And when he told you this, was the reason you needed the tea rather a bad reason?" 

Lina pulled a face of half-resignation and half-protest, "It was just...a _little_ waterfall. It's not like he hasn't done worse!" 

"Worse than, I have to assume, jumping off a waterfall. Were there other options than jumping off the waterfall?" Olivia asked with the kind of patience bourn of a very long time caring for children. 

Lina knew she sounded about as guilty as one of the children as she ducked her head slightly with her, "Yes." 

"Take this," Olivia handed over a bowl of stew and a thick slice of the fresh bread, "and go sit in the sunshine while it's there. You need to recharge." 

Lina managed a ghost of a smile, wandering through the house only to find that it had changed its layout slightly, bringing her to a set of balcony doors into a tea garden that she couldn't remember actually seeing when they'd arrived. 

Lina drew in a deep breath, and almost laughed at herself as a ripple of shock went through her at the scent of roses and jasmine on the air; the flowers in full bloom despite the time of year or the fact that they were supposedly on the Irish coast. 

The small table and chair were set up to overlook the cliff to the waters beneath, and Lina felt the unnatural, but pleasant warmth of an early summer day as she stepped out. A quilt that had not been there a moment ago now draped over the chair, waiting for her to tuck it around herself against the gentle chill of the breeze, and Lina felt like she ought to be afraid of the Sanctuary, if only for its efficiency. 

"I can't see you, but I can feel you. Was there something you needed from me?" Lina asked the ostensibly empty air beside her, and was not in the least surprised when a piece of chalk raised over the garden path; there, ready, for when the ghost-children wanted to talk to any who couldn't see or hear them. 

_You don't have to be afraid._ The scrawl was not that of a child, and Lina's head tilted, brow furrowing, because Grams moved over all the ghosts she could, but the adults were usually too stuck in their ways to come to the Sanctuary with her if she proved unable to accomplish the task. 

"What is it I don't have to be afraid of?" Lina decided to ask; knowing that trying to deny that she was afraid would be a waste of breath. 

_Losing Hunter._

"I think that's the most-logical fear I can have, darling." Lina sat down at a small patio table, closing her eyes for a moment to savour the warmth and sun. 

By the time she'd opened her eyes, the response had been written, _It takes a lot more than death to lose a part of yourself, Lady Lina._

"As much as I like to think he is, Hunter isn't truly a part of me, and platitudes about the love we have conquering little things like death aren't exactly my cup of tea, thank you." 

The chalk rose to write the ghost's response, and all at once, an icy wind kicked up, the chalk dropping to the ground and shattering, and the presence of the ghost Lina had felt in the first place disappeared with a lingering aftertaste of fear in its wake. Lina gasped, standing back from the table, and the wind died just as instantly as it'd appeared. 

Lina felt her power tingle dully in her palms, though she was far too tired to actually be able to do anything, and barely knew anything about ghosts, let alone enough to know what the hell could chase one off as that one had been. 

The lapse in her education on the supernatural had been a silent agreement: Lina had not died, and could not see or hear ghosts as a result--but it went deeper than that. Mama Tamae had taught Hunter how to ward Lina from ghosts because there had been something haunting Lina from her birth. 

It came as no real shock, of course: Lina's father had disappeared, presumed dead, the night she'd been born, and five days later, Lina's mother had died of her broken heart, new baby be damned. Of course Lina would be haunted. But Mama Tamae, before she'd been chased out of the house by Lina's harridan of a guardian, had told the little girl very carefully that Lina's parents were not what was haunting her. 

Leaning her head back and closing her eyes, Lina breathed slowly and made a conscious effort to put down her growing worries. Worries about Hunter, about the efficacy of the wards that were meant to keep her ghosts at bay, about the threat of war growing once again, as it so horrifically had just a few years before. 

"Lina?" Persephone's voice was soft enough that were Lina as asleep as she looked, it wouldn't have woken her, and Lina smiled immediately at that kindness. Looking over at the goddess of the dead, Lina found her resplendent in a pullover knit with honeycomb pattern down her shoulders, the soft gold of the yarn giving off the lightest glimmer, as if it were real gold woven into the fabric. Persephone's hair had gone to wild curls, caught back from her face with an amber lattice of honeycomb to complete her queen-bee look. Lighting up in delight, Lina's smile bloomed into a grin. 

"Would you care to join me, my lady?" Lina offered, realizing that there was only one chair, and looking around for a second. 

Persephone's fingers curled towards the ground as if beckoning from the earth, and as Lina watched, a throne of roses grew, the thorns careful not to present to sting Persephone, though they were undeniably still there. Taking her seat with an air more regal than any queen Lina had ever gotten to see before. Persephone flared her hand out once again, a blossom eagerly leaping to her hand and blooming out into a teacup gently curling with the steam of floral tea. 

"You seem to have taken to the lighthouse-keeper aesthetic with aplomb." Lina murmured with plain appreciation. 

"My favourite time of year is fall and winter, Lina," Persephone told her innocently, batting long eyelashes as prettily as a picture, "any chance I have to wear the fashion is a good chance for me." 

Biting back a tease at what Persephone would be wearing while she was in the halls (or the arms) of her beloved husband, Lina looked over the garden spread out incongruously around them. In the abstract, Lina knew well that the Sanctuary, by necessity, wasn't bound to a floorplan, let alone a state of reality; but the garden in which they sat was doing a number on Lina's brain; the logic of where they were and the time of year they were in beaten to a bloody pulp by the blooms surrounding them now. 

"You were communing with the spirits, I see." Persephone noted with throaty laughter that rang somehow wrongly in Lina's ears. 

"I...I have a question, my queen." Lina stuttered the starting, but her determination grew even as she gave voice to the words, "The wards I have always had...that are meant to keep a spirit from being able to get near me--" 

"You've always had?" Persephone interrupted, a look of shock and calculation crumpling her brow. 

"Wards were put on me as an infant. There was a haunting that posed a threat to my life, or Mama Tamae never would have put them up in the first place." 

Persephone regarded Lina with narrowed eyes, her lips pursing gently, "You two do make the strangest of pairs: Hunter being half-raised by a ghost in his house, and you suffering the threat of one wanting to kill you." 

The sensation was rather like having her chair knocked out from under her, Lina reflected. Blinking slowly, Lina leaned in closer as if volume of speech would have any bearing on state of secrecy. "He never told me that." 

Persephone observed her closely, but she remained open, "Hunter...acts as something of a grounding wire, if I'm not mistaken. Ghosts get stronger in the presence of those with a certain skillset...but Hunter's power is on par with Olivia; they don't even have to think of it to help to keep the ghosts around them tethered here." The edge of near-jealousy in Persephone's voice sent Lina's arms erupting in gooseflesh. "And the biggest problem with that is that Hunter's had that power--far too much power--since he was a babe.

"I can't speak to whom your wards were created against, but to say that it had to be very strong, or very insidious to warrant a ward that wasn't tailored for it. But I can tell you that, no matter what Parthenon the wards call upon to protect you, they are meant to be only temporary measures. And if they've lasted, even with re-application, for this long, then Hunter is far more powerful a creature than I would be comfortable tangling with." 

Lina swallowed, going cold and shivering. 

"You might not know ghosts, Lina," Persephone coaxed with gentle eyes, "but you do know warding magic. You know as well as I that there is no permanent fix to a ward: you either curse the thing into a box and hope no one is ever fool enough to release it, or you take it out of play entirely. This warding of yours has lasted longer than any I've heard of before--the longest I've heard of was only five years, and it had broken entirely, not just pushed to the point of creeping ineffectiveness. And I have to assume that it's creeping ineffectiveness, or you wouldn't be hungover from magical overuse: you'd more likely be on death's door, between what you did for us and anything else draining you to claw its way back to the land of the living." 

Lina nodded; that much was fairly plain, if she were being honest. For all her strength, Lina knew she needed to be very, very thankful that they had come to the one place where security was not ever a necessary concern. Persephone was a guarding presence, and Olivia and the magic of her Sanctuary would tear apart anything that threatened her or Hunter, likely long before either of them needed to be aware that there was a problem. 

"I'd rather we leave the dead for now, though. And our quarry, if I may be so bold. Reading through the journals of the Keepers of the Sanctuary may yet leave the imprint of letters on my closed eyes tonight." Lina snorted slightly at Persephone's assertion, and nodded her acceptance. "Tell me instead about your godling. I'm shocked that he's still...around. Still a god." 

It was well-known enough that as gods fell out of favour, their power diminished: better known still that many gods that were forgotten completely instead became mortal eventually, if the loss of their power and prestige did not kill them outright. Lina's godling was of a Gaulish set of gods that were lost well before the tide of Christianity reached that land. For the most part, it was not something they talked about--for the most part, Lina reflected, they never really deigned to talk. But Lina had long ago figured out more than her godling would have liked. "It was a bet." 

Persephone turned to regard Lina with a look of questioning that had Lina laughing outright, it was so priceless. 

"He scraped by for so long that Nike and he crossed paths. And you know she can't resist a victory. But in making a bet with her that she will outlast him in memory, she has to remember him." 

Persephone's mouth fell open, the sheer beauty of that little plan written all over her beautiful features, and Lina laughed harder. 

"I'm not sure that it wasn't something of a...kindness," Lina admitted, shrugging a shoulder. Her godling had had lovers before her just as much as he had during their relationship, and it very well could have been that Nike was among them, "but it was a tidy way of solving the problem of keeping his immortality." 

Shaking her head and chuckling, Persephone gazed out over the garden; its blooms growing all the more radiant and all the more fragrant under her regard. "I don't quite understand the urge...to keep immortality." Persephone admitted after a moment. "I am glad of it--a forever with Hades may never be enough time for me, I hope you won't mock me to admit. But if...if we were mortal? If we were confined to one life, however long that lifetime may prove to be, I would not love him any less, and would not choose any differently. Wanting to be immortal so badly that you'd get through it by hook or by crook? No, that's not really my style. If we'd been lost, like so many before us have been, then we'd have lived and died, and found our happiness. No chance at immortality will grant happiness or a sense of completion." 

"Most unhappy mortals don't understand that granting themselves more time won't mean that they'll change their lives to find the happiness that they themselves have denied in what time they have." Lina murmured, both agreement and, in small part, explanation. "From what I've read, the...the true loves of the gods get granted immortality, too. And to be honest, if Hunter is not there for it, I don't think I want it." 

"He's your focal point." Persephone noted, "He's what you built your life around, and the family you have had for years. I can understand how an immortality without him would be torturous." 

Lina looked over at Persephone, confusion wrinkling her brow, "One thing I don't understand..." Lina began, the thought uncomfortable, "why did Trystin's first love die, if they were true?" 

A ghost of a smile touched Persephone's mouth, but her eyes were incomprehensibly sad, "It could be a few things, of course. They might not have really been true: if you go by the reincarnation theory, true loves have to become who they are meant to be before they can really be the one that matches, but the core of the soul is enough to...create an anchor. Someone like Ares would tell you it's because Trystin was too weak to will it so. But the theory I ascribe to is that, for as much as the human loves of godly lovers will gain the agelessness of immortality, that doesn't mean that they can't be killed in other ways." 

Lina shuddered, and knew, in the abstract, that she'd known that, in some small way, all along. She'd still been careful, even if she was meant, as the consort of a god, to be immortal. 

"You would have to become a god in your own right for you to truly see--" Persephone cut herself off, looking confused. 

Lina tipped her head to the side, regarding Persephone closely now. "You don't mean through ambrosia, or any of that mythical bullshit, do you? In that second, you meant that I could become a god. How?" 

Persephone blinked, "I...I don't really know." Colour bloomed over her cheeks, and Lina sat back in her chair a little further, "I--There's something that I think I need to do, instead of chasing after Chace with you and Hunter and Olivia--as much as, believe me, I would love to." 

"You need to know how gods are made." Lina supplied simply, and shrugged when Persephone's gaze snapped to hers, "Anyone who's seen Zeus and your mother knows that Demeter would not let him anywhere near her." 

Persephone laughed as if it'd been punched from her, crumpling slightly. "What if I don't want to know what happened?" 

"Then don't look for it." Lina replied easily, "You can find how one becomes a god another way...Shit, you could find how Ares became a god." Persephone's head snapped up, a green that was as all-consuming as an aeroplane crash in the jungle flaring in her eyes. 

"And how to unmake him, if we can." Persephone agreed. 

Lina nodded, "Humans are prone enough to war as it is, I know. But if w e can take some of the...the manic devotion? I've little doubt it'd help." 

Persephone regarded Lina, her smile so slight that it was almost a trick of the light. "Have you ever wondered, knowing what you do about the divine, who the ever-loving fuck makes these rules up?" 

Lina laughed, "You know as well as I do that the story of the thing brings power to the thing itself. The rules of magic we know may not have been anything close to what magic used to be capable of." 

Persephone considered, warm breeze teasing at her curls as she idly beckoned more blooms from the nearest rose; a delicate, miniature thing that bloomed a lovely pink when she coaxed it forth. 

"Would it comfort you more? If life were dictated by something even above a god?" 

"I...No, not precisely. What would comfort me is to have control. My story...the story that is told of me with Hades, it's a perversion of the truth, and I would hate, with a passion, the day that I lost the truth of our story to the one that was propagated--" Persephone cut herself off before she could say something disparaging about humanity that Lina probably would not have been offended by. 

"But in your own story, you have control." Lina pointed out, "A god with one disciple is still a god: your story, so long as you keep it, and you tell it, can't be erased by the lie."


	8. Chapter 8

"I don't allow mirror-scrying in this house." Olivia murmured easily from the door to Persephone's rooms; as simply as though she'd been privy to Persephone's growing desperation to do exactly that. "That being said, I know that Phoebe gave you something you need to chase after." Olivia gave a tiny grin at this, "That girl does have a way of changing one's perspectives, doesn't she?" 

"The quickest way for me to get to the records of who built the prison or cursed Chace is--" 

"Is for you to take a walk through the looking glass. But, my queen, in this time of desperation, who's to say that there isn't a spirit on that side of the glass willing to risk your wrath and your husband's to inhabit the vacated body of the Queen of the Underworld?" 

Persephone turned to fully face Grams, her eyes narrowed and arms crossing reflexively across her chest. Against her collarbone, Persephone felt Kifo stir, agitated by her agitation. 

Olivia's gaze fell to the head of the snake, just barely visible under the collar of Persephone's boatneck sweater, and a glint of cunning a fox would be jealous of flashed over her features. "Now with a familiar like that," Olivia nodded to the snake slowly emerging off of Persephone's skin, coiling obediently around her hand when she reflexively reached for him, "you should be protected." With an impish smile, Olivia winked at the snake, looking at the door as he hissed softly in response. "If you recruit Margot to help you shift it, there's a rather lovely set of full-length mirrors that used to be used for just such purposes in the basement. Make sure you keep them covered when the two of you bring them up and place them facing each other." 

Persephone jerked a nod, knowing well that any mirror ever used for mirror-magic could never be reliably used again: the things that mirrors contained called too close to the surface for safety once magic had been involved. 

"And I'm sure we both know that discretion is key here, my queen. Can't have anyone finding out I'll bend my rules for the right ruler." Olivia winked, and Persephone could feel the flood of warmth come off of her skin as the tattoos shifted to lush, full roses and delicate jasmine blossoms. 

"Thank you, Grams." 

Olivia quirked a smile, humming as she passed back through the door, the melody sending a shudder down Persephone's spine. 

For as desperate as she was to do it; to chase her white rabbit of a question, Persephone was equally dreading it. There was a very good reason that mirror-scrying was only undertaken by the stupid or the utterly desperate, and Persephone loathed to her bones that she was fast becoming the latter. 

In the regular mirror hanging over Persephone's vanity, she met her own gaze; the weariness drawing her shoulders down ironing out under her own disapproval, and the pinch at the corner of her mouth smoothing until she looked like queen who'd tricked Orpheus into his afterlife--like the goddess even her most ardent worshippers never dared ask anything from. 

Kifo slid under the sleeve of her sweater, the coil of muscle an easy thing, but she looked down at where she knew his head to be, "What do you think, little fire?" She sighed, and felt some of the weariness return immediately. "Ready to eat anything that tries to keep me on the wrong side of the looking glass?" 

Recruiting Margot for the heavy lifting was easy; it was more trying to keep her from looking into either of the mirrors that proved a challenge. 

Persephone had to assume that though she didn't condone it, Olivia had to be teaching the children the risks of it; that it was Margot's youth that was lending itself to the draw to danger more than it was any kind of ignorance of what the danger was, but a story to go with it never hurt. 

"You've read Lewis Carroll, I take it?" Persephone grunted slightly as she set the first mirror in against the back of the room; the breadth of it working well enough that the light in the room immediately dropped. 

"Alice? Yes. I know about the myths about...things on the other side of the glass." Margot scoffed, setting down the second just inside the door, the two already facing each other, covered. 

Persephone quickly crossed to the vanity mirror, covering it thoroughly with two blankets and making damn sure that anything else reflective in the room was well-hidden. "Not just things, Margot. People. The worst people." Persephone considered for only a moment, knowing the phrasing before she could even think to reach for it, "Do you ever wonder what would happen to those who are so malicious, so evil, that they couldn't even be dealt with by demons?" 

Margot's large blue-grey eyes widened further, the corners of her mouth pulling down. 

"Demons and creatures of the Underworld are just as susceptible to charisma as anything else, Margot; so when we come across a soul built to bend will and mind, there has to be a prison for them that won't allow them out. His lack of charisma not withstanding, I will be putting Viktor Chace in one of these prisons." 

"But...are you saying that the prison--" 

"The Chinese and the Victorians were smart, covering their mirrors after a death. The easiest way to imprison and punish a soul is to put it in the mirror-world. 

"Imagine, a room with a billion windows, each leading to freedom; each casting an image of the world outside of your prison which you can't interact with. Bearing witness in silent seething, the world on the other side." 

Margot's expression told Persephone that while Olivia had told her charges about mirror-magic, she hadn't given that particular piece of the puzzle. 

"If you're strong enough--if you're not dead yet--you can usually push through the prison of the mirrors, onto the true other side; Mr. Carroll's Wonderland, in essence. A world that looks like ours, that would be ours, but is never...quite....right. Often, anyone pushing to Wonderland will bring something back with them through, usually into the prison, but sometimes far enough to get to our plane. So these prisons aren't just a disconnect: they are a hunting ground, with nowhere to hide." 

"So you're going to get answers from...Wonderland?" 

"No, I'm going to get answers from Hell, using the prison mirrors in the Great Hall. The prisoners can't break through to this side without an improperly-closed mirror portal; but I can." 

Margot's nodding turned into a sudden and terrified pallor, "But won't these mirrors....?" 

"Kifo," Persephone called her snake from off her skin, and as the serpent slowly began to unravel from her hand to the floor, he grew until the room felt nearly claustrophobic, "will be eating anything that tries to break through before I'm back." 

Margot looked like she was about to faint, but was nodding. "Is there anything else you need?" 

"No, dear. Thank you." Persephone winced inwardly as the amusement and genuine admiration in her voice sent a shudder of fear down Margot's spine before the girl scarpered. 

Sighing, Persephone laid a collection of pillows on the ground between the mirrors, casting around the room once more to make sure there wasn't a hint of reflection to be found. 

"Ready?" Persephone asked, looking to Kifo even if the question was, truly, only for herself. Knowing this, Kifo flicked his tongue at her, and Persephone got the sense that if snakes could roll their eyes, he would have. 

Fingertips finding the fabric covering each mirror, Persephone took a deep breath, hellfire flickering to life the candles making the protective circle around them at her thought--just before she whipped away the coverings, and faced the reflections. 

It wasn't so much remembering something forgotten, as it was being swallowed whole by it. 

Persephone was not unfamiliar with fire and smoke—but this was different. Persephone was standing in a hut that was burning; smoke reaching its curling fingers down her throat and into her nose, stinging at her eyes. 

What was worse was the screams and the laughter she could hear; the two blending until grief and triumph was the roaring of the flame, the ringing of her ears as she choked to death in a home built to keep her safe. 

It was the place of Demeter, and Demeter alone, the soldiers had said, to control the crops and blossom the land. Her gift; from the time she was born, and blooms burst from the ground beneath her mother to catch her as she came into this world, was an abomination. 

Her mother was the one screaming—her mother was not Demeter. Not by birth. 

Demeter was her mother by death.


	9. Chapter 9

The train trip had been somewhat harrowing--to the point that Lina dimly remembered Hunter talking about a curse that would steadily build the anxiety and paranoia of a person until they took their own life with the tumult of their fears, and she would not have been surprised in the least to learn that she was a new target. 

It wasn't simply that Lina fully expected an attack like the one they'd nearly been victim of with Persephone: it was the very real and very visceral sense of wrong which came hand-in-hand with the act of Lina and Hunter splitting up. 

Lina had done so half in-hope that, somehow, they would come across the way to fix this without Hunter, while Hunter worked to narrow down where Trystin was back in safety. 

The locator potion to find concentrations of magic was supposed to be used for cursed objects; Grams, in a stroke of brilliance born of the expectation of failure, had decided to try to use the steam to soak into a set of maps. The hope was that the potion would adhere to the idea that magic was not so much about ceremony as it was about intention; and that the intensity of the magic collected in the River of Poison would prove to show more intensely than other collections of magic. 

They'd narrowed it as far as the city, but could go no further, and there wasn't exactly a way to find a lost underground fortress, cursed or not. 

So Hunter stayed to find a way to lead himself to Trystin, if he could; and Lina and Olivia went to prepare and to see if they couldn't find it the old-fashioned way. 

She couldn't help but have it not sit right with her: Lina and Hunter had each others' backs in a way that Lina could not expect of anyone else, even Olivia. With something as dangerous as this, for as much as Lina knew Hunter could hold his own, she didn't know that she really trusted him to, not with this. Leaving him behind was safer, but some strange instinct also told her that it left them wide-open for Hunter going off on his own with it. 

Tired enough that it wasn't so much snapping back to her surroundings as it was surfacing out of the miasma of her thoughts, Lina could almost catch a hint of the scent of overripe oranges on the air. 

Beside her, Olivia wore the form of a young, novice secretary. Too beautiful by half for the role that she was playing, but with a naivete that had the conductors and taxis scrambling to do her bidding, just as much as Hunter's air of harried storytelling evoked. With her blonde hair in finger waves, and her eyes gone shockingly wide and a muddled green, Olivia used the attraction that focused on her as a weapon and shield. 

It was admirable, and if Lina were able to, she'd have employed the same tactic: but for Lina, the knowledge behind the subtle seduction was not so easily hidden. 

As she strode into the hotel in which they would all be staying in, Lina gathered her strength; straightening her back and broadening her shoulders as the leader she had been born into being, even if she had not been raised to become the woman she would ultimately be. She knew that there was royalty in her bloodline; her aunt had been very clear about that. What her aunt hadn't expected was just which royal it was she was related to: because Gráinne Ní Mháille was not the kind of royal she ought to have encouraged Lina to become. A rebellious queen of pirates was not the sort of woman Lina's aunt had been desperate for her to become. 

"Lady Hughes," the concierge of the hotel was scrambling awkwardly, nearly falling over himself to get to her, and Lina knew simply from that that something was amiss. 

That instinct was about all the warning Lina had before she was dodging a kitchen knife thrown at her head. 

"Olivia, tell me that there's no one standing where that knife was just thrown from." 

"There isn't," Olivia replied tightly, seizing Lina by the back of her dress and swinging her out of the line of fire as an entire kitchen's variety of knives began to fly towards them. The concierge let out a loud squeak, bordering on a shrill. "How long has this hotel had a ghost?" Olivia's eyes went from the golden-green they had been lingering in the ranges of to a pinning grey, nearly the colour of a hurricane cloud. 

"F-For years, longer...longer than I've been here! But it was never--" 

"Never violent?" Lina grit, using the trim leather attaché case she'd been carrying to block a paring knife. 

"No." 

Olivia and Lina shared a look at that assertion, then turned the attention back to the onslaught, Olivia's neat interception of a butcher knife nearly coinciding with Lina catching a fillet knife from hitting its mark. 

"There's something...I can do." Olivia offered, the stiltedness of her words raising Lina's hackles even further than the concierge's approach had. "But I'll need somewhere to recuperate once it's done." 

Once again the concierge found himself pinned with a look--or two, this time. He jerkily nodded, and Olivia's change of expression was like a sudden change in the wind. Lina reached over and grabbed the shaking man, pulling him deeper into cover as Olivia shifted away from it, her demeanour changing until she could only be likened to an inferno. 

Lina and the concierge shrank back as the air actually warped around Olivia with the heat she gave off; every piece of glass near them exploding with the sudden change of pressure and temperature. Lina could barely keep her eyes open for the dry heat, but as Olivia rose, she could see an aura of wings spreading, Olivia's skin golden and glowing as her eyes became the blue heart of the hottest of flames. 

"Enough!" Olivia roared, the marble warping beneath her feet as another knife was launched towards them, only to melt long before it could be registered as a threat. 

Olivia's illusion of wings twitched, the air they produced feeling like a desert wind blowing molten sand against Lina's skin. Lina could feel it in her bones before she could register the sound, and reflexively, Lina clamped her hands down hard over the concierge's ears; a little proud of herself for being more concerned with the innocent bystander than she was with herself. 

The sound that burst from Olivia's chest blotted the world from Lina's mind; she was safe, she somehow knew, and she would remain safe, but she was blissfully disconnected as the cry of a phoenix beckoned whatever wayward souls were haunting the hotel back home. 

There had been no such thing as phoenixes, as far as Lina had known; but the story was very clear when she'd really looked: a creature with dominion over life and death, whose cry had the ability to drive those that heard it mad with the longing for the peace that oblivion brings. 

When the world began to trickle back in around the edges, Lina hoped she managed to bite back the protesting whimper. She didn't want to go back to the world; and this was where the madness laid. 

There was a hand petting through her hair; rough with callouses and heavy with rings, and Lina didn't know how she knew who it was, but she somehow did. It was someone who would keep her safe. Would keep her sane. She'd just had to let him close enough to do it.


	10. Chapter 10

_Hunter shuffled the tarot deck as though in a trance. He wouldn’t read the cards; a witch couldn’t read their cards without jinxing themselves and squandering whatever path they tread upon._

_So he shuffled._

_The cards weren’t the standard size, and it had taken him a long time to learn the tricks with these that he’d perfected with playing cards, but he had done it. Another part of his training. Another piece in his discipline._

_Lina would have stopped him had she caught him doing this, he knew. The more he shuffled the deck, the stronger the magic of it became, and knowing the future too well was never a gift. But instead, across from him sat a ghost. The ghost that had been trying to haunt Lina because he hadn’t already given in to the pull of chasing Trystin down and saving him._

_Silently, the ghost of the single greatest seer to have ever lived reached across the table into the blur of his deck, and plucked a single card from the shuffle as he riffled them between his hands. Hunter looked up at her at last, feeling like an animal facing down an auto. “I’m sorry.”_

_His voice clicked with the words and the weight of them, and he was ashamed even more for how pathetic they sounded._

_“Do you know why it had to be you?” Cora asked, her thick brows arching. She gazed at them steadily, the card unseen lying between them._

_“Because I’m the reincarnation.”_

_Cora’s lips twitched, her smile in her eyes even as she fought it off her mouth, “You’re an incarnation, Hunter. Not the only one. Just the one who can save him. Just the one who has come far enough to understand…”_

_The note of struggle in her voice told Hunter that they were treading too close to one of her prophecies for true freedom of speech, and Hunter felt rage roil within him at Ares for cursing his daughter so thoroughly. “The war,” Hunter murmured, and Cora nodded her unspeakable agreement. He’d had to come through the war before he’d be capable of freeing Trystin. He’d had to learn how far he would go; and he’d had to know what the cost truly was. “I won’t be the one to really save him, though. Lina will.”_

_Cora’s amusement grew, a confirmation that was at once terrible and comforting. “It’s amazing what the promise of the love of a like-minded soul will give as grace. You know as well as I do that the world turns, and your time will come back again.”_

_Hunter didn’t dare look down at the card lying abandoned on the table between them. “There was a time I would have welcomed giving up this life and taking another kick at the can,” Hunter put the deck of cards neatly next to the one laid on the table, “how is it that my timing is always so far off?”_

_Cora shrugged with only one eyebrow, “Because you save up your perfect timing for when you actually need it.”_

_Hunter bit back his smile, shaking his head slightly. He turned to look at Melinöe where she waited, her power stabilizing Cora enough for this nightmare to do what it needed to._

_"Why were you trying to put a nightmare in Lina's head?" Hunter asked, as if the question of it had been nagging at him._

_Melinöe smiled her sharp-toothed smile, the image of her blinking between the goddess and the ghost; hair lank with the water she drowned in, skin mottled and bloated. "I told you. She's haunted."_

_"But not just by me." Cora supplied, and if Hunter wasn't privy to her past, he would have missed the way she shifted as though preparing herself for impact. "She's going to have a lot of trouble with ghosts..."_

_Hunter lifted a hand to stem the flow of words before Cora's curse could have the chance to stop her, and Cora's relief was visible. "I'll make you a deal, Melinöe," the goddess tilted her head, and for a split second, it was as though her neck had snapped, before she was the goddess once more, over the ghost. "If you get me to that prison, I'll release the ghosts trapped inside it."_

_Melinöe lifted a brow as sharp as Hunter's knives, "And if you fail?"_

_"Then you'll have my ghost to play with, because if I fail, there will be nothing but unfinished business left behind me." Melinöe is no torturer or tormentor, not to the dead; but with Hunter's knowledge, his experience, by her side, her nightmares would be all the more chilling._

_A rather lovely win-win, if you cared to ask her._


	11. Chapter 11

There was only ever darkness. 

There was only ever darkness. 

Only ever darkness. 

Darkness. 

Darkness. 

And then there was something else in the darkness. Something else in the void, in the silence. An impact, and a stuttering drag as lungs knocked loose of their careful grasp of air tried desperately to re-inflate. 

The impact of a dirt floor beneath his feet crumpled Hunter to his hands and knees. The darkness and silence was complete around him, and for a moment it was only the ground beneath him that let Hunter know he had actually survived getting there. The godly power of teleportation was...unpleasant to say the least. Humans were not meant to be able to survive it. This was not the first time Hunter had had to manage, though. 

Closing his eyes for a moment, Hunter reached past the side-effects of the teleportation, willing his heart to resume its normal restriction and his lungs to inflate and deflate properly instead of the painful seizing. 

In the darkness, Hunter heard the rattle of chains, and knew that Trystin could hear him; was at least strong enough to be able to move. Coughing up fluid, Hunter forced himself to breathe through the pain until it was manageable enough for him to speak. "Close your eyes, Trystin." Hunter panted, his clear voice reverberating terrifyingly around whatever they were in. Summoning flame to his fingertips, Hunter blinked at the skeleton laying just a few feet from where he knelt, the fluid proving to be blood beneath him, spattered on his mouth. 

It was the first light to pierce the void for...forever, but not. The twisted wreckage of Trystin's grasp on the world was distorted enough that there was no accounting for time, no telling if it had been dream or not, the days when he'd found love; if it'd been nightmare or not when he'd listened to the man he'd loved die painfully and brutally, begging for him to save them. 

Getting his own breathing under control, Hunter could now hear a wheezing rattle of breath echoed back; and the urge to pull himself to his feet; to track Trystin down and find a way to reach him, was just as painful as the after-effects of the teleportation. 

Hunter hoped that his very presence wasn't causing Trystin pain; could only imagine the overwhelm that would come with finally having input after so long in darkness and silence. Dragging himself to his feet, Hunter bit back a noise of pain, his legs feeling as if the bones had been splintered as his body adjusted further to having been erased and reconstructed to get here. 

Beneath Hunter's tread, bones of the innocent crunched; those of the city above that had once sought refuge in the city below, and as the story unfolded for Hunter, he realized that he and the godling were not actually alone. 

Hunter could sense the stories of the dead slowly revealing themselves to his small circle of light; could feel the lingering horror and pain of people lost to both a person and a place that was meant to be an offer of safety. 

The slow shriek of iron gates made to keep the evils of this place in sent Hunter's chest tight with agony. In his previous life, he'd opened those gates; and they'd been left open--until now.

"Did you really think I wouldn't keep tabs on the greatest weapon there's ever been? That I'd forget where he was?" 

It was a taunt, and Hunter could see with perfect clarity where he had put his footing wrong. Ares didn't need him to find Trystin: Ares needed him to break him. 

"It's hard to tell, Ares, in your old, old age, what you'll be able to remember." 

Ares's roil of laughter echoed off the walls of the chamber hewn from the earth, and Hunter didn't have to look to know that it stirred the ghosts he could catch glimpses of. All of them still in the stage of their phantasm that twisted them into the masks of death they had worn, rather than the faces of the people they had actually been. "You think you're going to stop me, little soldier?" 

Between one blink and the next, there was a woman standing in front of Hunter; her features cold and disconnected as the sparks of light he'd had dancing along his fingers passed the scant space from his fingertips to settle into her. 

Black eyes snapped to his, and Hunter managed, barely, not to flinch before her story unfolded for him, too. 

"I am not a soldier. And you weren't meant to be, either." Hunter replied, voice adopting the flatness of the woman's expression. "You were meant to be a king." 

"You've picked up a new trick." Ares observed, "And met Adoni." 

Hunter tilted his head, listening at the familiar sounds of a gun being pulled from a holster. "Trystin, if you can, cover your ears." Hunter breathed, and the rustle of chains rang through the chamber in response, "You were betrothed, but there was a warlord threatening this land." Hunter supplied, ducking neatly as a barrage of gunfire was let off. Adoni's ghost flickered, turning her head to the source of the gunfire, and Hunter felt a tiny pang of kinship with this fallen queen as the gun promptly jammed in Ares's hand. "You went to battle, and in so doing, you gained bloodlust. Until your reputation for bloodshed and violence surpassed the warlords'--until they began praying to you." 

The automatic fire was given up for the blind rage of a pistol, its click as it ran out of bullets bringing a grin to Hunter's mouth even as he took cover behind the crumbling wall of one of the houses. 

"Understand something, Ares: Adoni didn't stop loving you for doing your duty; she stopped loving you because you loved the blood more than you loved your people, and that's no trait for a king." 

"So I became a god!" Ares roared, and Hunter slid away as the crumbling wall crumbled further. Sparing barely a thought to the integrity of the ceiling above them, Hunter sprinted for a new place to take cover. 

_"Not to me."_ Adoni replied, her voice resonant in a way that Ares could never manage; but there was no rattle of decay bringing the buildings down around her with that assertion. _"Not to us."_

Out of the corner of his eye, Hunter caught sight of a little boy beckoning him, the ghostly apparition of him giving off its own light even as Hunter's conjuring stayed with Adoni, bleeding light out of her image which actually made enough of a difference for him to be able to make out at least the worst of the obstacles in his path. . 

"Worthless words from a worthless leader." Ares spat, striding at last into the circle of light that bled from Adoni. In the back of his mind, Hunter began the calculations of how large the space was based on Ares's stride, the mental map trying to draw itself from no data but the hulking ruins of the city. 

"A leader who would protect her people from the ravening bloodlust of a cruel king? Yes, that sounds so very useless, Ares. Don't know why anyone would follow someone like that." Hunter baited, and Adoni was facing Ares's slow approach; but Hunter could sense her smile. 

Hunter shuddered, turning his head to find the child appearing beside him. The child reached out, and Hunter's heart gave a painful twist in his chest that the child's hand met his, and he could actually feel it. 

Being so close to death made sense, in this place; with Ares wanting to slaughter him. He'd hoped that Lina would at least be close before he reached this point, though. 

When Hunter and the ghost child reached the squat building, Hunter's breath caught painfully in his throat; his gaze raking over the construction, untouched by the slow weathering of time that every other building had been subject to. 

"And here I was hoping that there'd be no building left." Hunter breathed, shaking his head as he knelt before the cage door that had been affixed to the building long after this place had begun to house the dead. 

"Go." Trystin's voice was little more than a hint of wind through leaves in the coldest gasp of autumn; and Hunter can feel his magic reach out to Trystin despite knowing better than to expend himself when he ought to have been preparing for a fight. 

The light of the magic was gold; sparking a little like Lina's as it flit into the darkness of the prison and settled into the man who'd wasted away inside of it for millenia. Trystin hissed a breath as if it hurt, but Hunter could already read him well enough to know that it didn't; he didn't want Hunter using his magic to heal him anymore than Hunter thought it a good idea to do so. 

The chains rattled as Trystin shifted like he was trying to get away from the spread of the magic. Hunter winced, "Stop moving. I do remember that those chains were spiked, and every time you moved, it pierced the spikes in further." 

"You have to go. Open the gate, and go." 

"Mmm, terribly sorry to disappoint you so early in our acquaintance, Trystin, but I don't leave people behind. And you already know that." 

In the golden light of the magic, blue eyes met his, and Hunter remembered the feeling from the life he'd led before. Remembered being caught, when he hadn't known that there was anything to catch him from. Trystin looked just as desolate in that moment as he had when it'd first happened, all those ages ago. Hunter half-wanted to laugh at himself, for the hope he'd secretly had that, this time, Trystin would be happy. 

"Please. Don't." Trystin's voice sounded like his own again, and Hunter ached with the urge to cry for finally hearing it for himself; a voice that he'd known for years, that he'd feared he'd never have a chance to actually hear himself. 

Hunter squared his shoulders, a ripple of his power coming out, and the shackles Trystin was trapped in broke with a violent snap. 

Hunter hadn't been paying close enough attention to realize the sudden drop of temperature was anything more than the sap of power it had taken to break chains that had once been forged by Hephaestus. 

The impact of hatred and malice was worse than a physical blow; and Hunter left the ground wholesale, tumbling a good three feet before he hit the ground again, rolling even further than that as the ghost of Viktor Chace hissed and seethed into a flickering view. 

The man dripped with the poison of his very existence, the familiar snarl of his features sending an instinctive twist of fear through Hunter. 

And then he could hear the rattle of movement in the building Viktor had thrown him away from; could feel, before he heard, the rising tide of a growl. 

Ares's hand closed over the back of Hunter's neck from behind, lifting him off the ground then off his feet, and Hunter could see by the glee in the ghost's expression, that Ares meant to kill him then. 

_"NO!"_ The scream wasn't just Adoni's; it was Cora's as well, the two women descending on the god of war, and Hunter was knocked out of his grasp. The impact with the wall nearest them had Hunter struggling with how hard he'd hit his head; the knowledge that he would die in this place more concrete by the moment. 

Cora and Adoni's hands had gone through Ares's chest, into his heart, and Hunter had read about this; but had never actually imagined seeing it. Killing gods, even as a ghost, was a hard thing to do. 

"So it's just you and me now," Hunter panted slightly to Chace: Ares was beginning to wither, suspended in the grasps of the two ghosts whose forms got more solid the further Ares's faded away, "why aren't I surprised?"


	12. Chapter 12

It felt like Lina was dragging herself out of Heaven over broken glass to force her eyes open and to force herself upright. Olivia was watching her with unspeakable things in her eyes, and Lina had the brief wonder at how many people Olivia had ever seen drag themselves from the call to oblivion she'd let loose. 

It was worse than the aching numb of her life before she'd began living it for herself; worse, somehow, than the prospect of losing Hunter. But the prospect of losing Hunter was still on her mind; and it was a handhold, even if it wasn't quite enough to drag her out of the crushing wish to no longer be. 

"He's here." Lina croaked. "We have to get moving." 

Olivia's features somehow set further; stone going to diamond. She offered Lina a hand up, and Lina took it gratefully, forcing herself to get up and be steady, even if all she wanted was to crumble to dust. 

Next to her, the concierge had a stare that seemed to go past all existence, and was mumbling a litany in Greek that Lina didn't have the capacity to care to translate for herself. 

"I've never done that in front of someone else." Olivia told her stiltedly, and Lina nearly startled for it. "I didn't know. I'm sorry." 

Lina blinked slowly, the daze feeling as if she were under murky water trying to watch the world. "What do you think you are?" 

Olivia's brows furrowed, "What do you mean? I'm a witch. I have a power over the dead, yes, but it's not uncommon for one's speciality to be necromancy." 

"You're not a necromancer, Grams. Believe me. Now, come on. We don't have time. Hunter's here already." Too caught up in her own haze, Lina missed the tiny tell of Olivia's, indicating that the lie of what she was--what she had always told herself she was--was managing, however very barely, to protect her from the truth. 

The knowledge was as sure as the sun rising and setting, and Lina somehow also knew that the concierge would never regain his faculties; that the little he could hear through the block of her hands had driven him utterly mad. She didn't have time to wonder why she wasn't gibbering, so she didn't bother to wonder. Instead, she led Olivia through the unfamiliar streets until they came to a walkway that no one would notice; a door that no one could notice. Something prosaic and so utterly commonplace that no one ever wondered about it: hiding the most dangerous secret Lina had ever heard of. 

"Ares is here." Olivia growled slightly, pointing to a half of a bootprint in mud leading into the darkness beyond the door. 

"Hunter has the godkiller: Ares won't be here for long." 

Olivia's lips twitched, and she waved her hand, flames erupting obediently from her skin, casting shadows in a dance of death over the tunnel it led them into. 

Lina could feel the growing presence of the dead; that there was an instinctual urge of foreboding and the urge to run was nearly enough to be a taste of fear in the back of Lina's throat. It was more than Trystin trapped here, Lina reminded herself. This is the place that Chace had been siphoning the souls of the powerful to. 

There was more riding on Lina Hughes putting one foot in front of the other than Hunter Dyan, but she couldn't bring herself to care about it.

"I'm more concerned with crossing the river if it is the collection point for all those souls." Olivia admitted, "I had hoped...what I did in the hotel, I could do to the river without harming you or Hunter in doing it. But--" 

"I'll go, you wait on the other side." Neither of them believed for a moment that Olivia was about to do that; not with these stakes, and the part of Lina's mind that wasn't very carefully picking her way into the darkness of the tunnel combed desperately through the lore she knew of the phoenix to see what could possibly happen if that cursed river were to prove a challenge. 

"Lina," Olivia sounded intrigued, and Lina's unsteady gait over the tunnel path hesitated, but she didn't dare fully turn to look at Olivia behind her, "put your hand on the wall and give it a spark." 

Lina laid her palm against the rough, humid stone, and let her power fizz beneath her skin. Ore within the walls--too slight to even be identified--lit up with the surge of electricity, and Olivia gave a huff of laughter, snapping the fireball into non-existence. "I did not know I could do that." Lina muttered, sounding even to herself as if she was stunned. 

"If any humans were able to perceive this place, you wouldn't be able to: it would have been mined dry and there'd be nothing left." 

Lina grunted with disappointed resignation, and picked her way through the tunnel, the steadier light source helping exponentially, even if sparks were dancing off her fingers as they trailed across the wall. 

It was a palpable shift, the moment before Olivia reached out and stopped Lina with a hand on her arm. Olivia's hand flashed in Lina's line of sight, and the flutter of fire took flight from her fingertips like a bird on the wing, casting around a wider cavern and lighting torches as it went, decimating the cobwebs that had gathered so thick as to be the main source of fuel. Lina took her hand from the wall, and it was only as the glow she created ceased that she noticed the glow laying ahead of them; the cast of eerie green-blue somehow overpowering the warm light of the torches where it had faded into the light she'd summoned from the walls. 

The waters weren't tumultuous, but they exuded the impression that they ought to be; and the bridge crossing those waters, hewn from the stone of the cavern itself, felt like a threat to every hindbrain instinct Lina had. 

"This...isn't right..." Olivia mumbled, casting her gaze around the cavern, looking towards either end at the river's edges as if expecting something else to reveal itself to her. "There should be more souls here." 

"What?" 

Olivia blinked, bringing herself to look at Lina, "Persephone...the magic that's diminished from the world should all be here. But Persephone told me just how badly magic has diminished; it isn't simply that magic is dying faster than it can be recreated--there should be millions of souls here." 

Lina didn't know what it was Olivia could see, but she could surmise, from the look on Olivia's face, that it wasn't anywhere near that number. "So we have another place somewhere in the world that is full of trapped magic. We deal with this one in whatever way we have to, and then we tackle that one." 

Olivia trailed towards the mouth of the cavern through which the water flowed in, and it was as soon as Olivia was out of arm's reach that Lina could hear it. 

The sound wasn't like the phoenix's cry; it wasn't like anything Lina had words to give name to. It was a call home that Lina had never gotten to hear before, wrapped in the most beautiful song that had ever been conceived. And Lina was walking towards the sound--towards the river--without a single thought beyond returning to the call of the mother who'd died before they'd gotten to properly meet; the father who'd vanished in the night, the mystery never to be solved. 

The last thing Lina could process as her foot lifted over the edge of the river and began its descent into the water that was rising up to greet her was Olivia suddenly screaming her name. 

_It was like missing an entire staircase worth of steps, the plunge of what didn't feel like water. Lina was looking at a woman with auburn hair and bright green eyes, and a man with her own fiery red locks._

_"Oh, my darling," Lina's mother cooed, reaching out to her._

_Dimly, Lina remembered the fae warning her that to embrace the dead on their side of the veil would be to forfeit her life. But Lina almost didn't care._

_"We've been waiting for you." Lina's father told her, and Lina shuddered away as he reached for her, too. "Ever since that night...ever since that witch stole us from you to give her own son life..."_

_"Hunter." Lina said, "I have to get back to Hunter."_

_"No, my darling; he's the one that took us from you." Lina's gaze snapped to her mother's face, and the woozy sensation intensified tenfold._

_"Something isn't right." Lina managed, and nearly crumpled in relief to feel the presence storm up at her side._

_In the scrying realm, Persephone glowed golden with the light of a thousand spring mornings; but her features held the storms which watered flowers into blooming or caused untold damage. She took Lina's arm firmly, not tearing her eyes from Lina's parents as they glowed a poisonous green. Her teeth were bared in a snarl as she looked both spirits up and down, "You are not the Hughes. Stop wearing their faces while I still allow you ownership of a face."_

_The illusion of Lina's parents dissipated, and Lina looked at Persephone. "What they said..."_

_"Does it matter?" Persephone cut to the chase without blinking an eye, facing Lina dead-on, her grip still firm. "Will that sway you from saving him?"_

_"No."_

_"Then leave it, and leave this place."_

_"How?" Lina looked around; there was no way to escape that she could see. The astral plane here was blurred so badly that she couldn't even tell how she'd crossed into it._

_"Breathe."_

Lina's body hadn't taken a breath; instinct stilling her lungs in the water, and the wooziness made sudden sense. She inhaled, and coughed hard, coming to with Persephone knelt beside her on the other side of the river from where Olivia now stood alone. 

Lina wasn't even wet, but it felt as if she'd been drowning; and the look on Olivia's face told her that she may as well have been. 

"Ow." Persephone groaned, "Going from scrying to reaching you to teleporting that quickly may just have given me whiplash." 

Lina choked on a laugh, and Olivia snorted loudly from the other side of the river. 

Persephone looked over to Olivia, then at the river, and a look of steel settled over her features that scared Lina more than anything she'd ever seen before. 

Olivia nodded once at Persephone's look, and wandered to the bridge, taking a deep breath before she put her first step onto the aged rock. 

The tumult of the river was real now, but as Lina watched in true awe, Olivia began to burn, her wings bursting from her back in full, fiery glory--no simple shadow now. The souls began to rise from the river; and Lina could see them, now. Her trip through the veil into the astral plane had granted her that much, and it was a new wonder as much as it was a new horror. 

There was something on Olivia's right forearm; something glowing as if it were on fire, and as Lina watched in horror, blood dripped from whatever it was to the bridge beneath, looking more like lava than blood. With an ear-splitting protest of metal and magic, whatever was on Olivia's wrist broke, and tumbled down, landing on the riverbed. The riverbed which was now dry below the steady tread of the phoenix, her full powers finally reclaimed from the dampener in which she'd been trapped. 

Eons of memory; of power, flooded into Olivia Owens, until she remembered that she wasn't really Olivia Owens--until she knew what had happened, and what would happen, and could feel the power to control all of it. 

Lina watched this, and understood it, but if she wanted to keep whatever small part of her mind that hadn't been broken yet, she couldn't try to analyze how she possibly could.


	13. Chapter 13

_"No, no! NO!"_ The defeated screams of Viktor Chace brought a smile to Hunter's bloodied lips, even as he struggled to force his body to move. 

Chace had smashed him through and against everything that he could be smashed against; Hunter was well aware that his shoulder was broken, and possibly a couple of ribs. But he was still breathing, and whatever had just happened, it had sent Chace spiralling, and that was all Hunter needed in the world to feel as if he was gaining a little more ground against his demons. 

Chace's attentions had been drawn away from Trystin's prison, so it allowed Hunter the opportunity to try to drag himself there. Adoni and Cora had disappeared, leaving the desiccated husk of what had been Ares behind. 

"Please, just go." Trystin begged as Hunter managed to reach the cage door. Adoni had taken the light with her, and Hunter didn't think it would be a good idea to create much more than what spilled into this cavern from the gates beyond now, but Hunter could picture the look on Trystin's face, even if he couldn't see it. 

"Give me one good reason." 

"Your life." Trystin replied almost before Hunter had finished, and Hunter groaned in pain even as he laughed. 

"Yeah, I said a 'good' reason." Hunter replied, using the bars of the door to lever himself to his feet, surprising himself by only moderately swaying once he got on them.

Trystin rose with him, his presence warm and magnetic, and Hunter wished more than ever that his past-self and Trystin had managed to have the time they'd dreamt of having together; just once, to take comfort and solace from the world, in each other's arms. "You...You can't save me without dying." 

"I'm well-aware. You couldn't talk me into leaving you here the first time, Trystin, and I was fevered enough to be malleable then. You've got no hope of it now." 

"If you let me out, there's no reckoning for the havoc--" 

"You could wreak? I'm aware. I'm also aware that you're better than that, Trystin Ó Faolían. And you might have lost me once before, but do you really think that if I'm capable of being here, now, that I won't find a way back again?"

Trystin huffed a breath with as much disbelief as a breath could hold. "Weren't you going to go open the gate?" 

"Oh, handsome, trying to get rid of me already? Too bad. I'm waiting for a signal." 

"What signal?" 

As if in answer to Trystin's question, the entire city beneath the city lit up as if there were a sun above them, and Hunter shuddered hard as every ghost rose from their houses and their abandoned bones, faces turned towards the gate; towards Olivia, on the other side of the gate. "That one." 

~

The woman whose name had not been Olivia Owens felt the attention of the dead beyond the gate turn to her, and even with the expenditure of power it had taken to cross over the dead that had populated that river, she knew well that she had more than enough strength to finish the job. She'd been trapped in this world for thousands of years; her full powers kept just out of reach. And now, with them returned, it was a harder thing to keep them at bay--to keep this world from snapping from existence under the onslaught of her returned power--than it would to cross over the millions of dead that were missing. 

She remembered, there had been a contract, once. A peace treaty; she was the source of all magic, of all life, of the world, and she had never wanted to influence any of the worlds one way or the other, so she had created a Council of all creatures, and had only used her powers when the council was in agreement that she should. 

"Olivia?" The woman's voice was uncertain, and when Olivia turned her head, she could see the girl--no, not the girl, it was Lina, and she knew it was Lina and she had to keep the memories she'd been cut off from from swamping her along the with the power, because this was not the time to slip or falter. 

To say the effort was Herculean would have been an understatement as Olivia forced the power back further, until she no longer burned. She shook under the weight of holding it back, stumbling slightly, and seeing the ground beneath her feet had actually melted to molten glass. 

_"Owens!"_ Roared the ghost of Viktor Chace, and Olivia raised her gaze placidly; she hadn't been scared of him during her service--not for her own sake, at least--and he wasn't about to start being more than a nuisance now. 

"You," the power resounding in Olivia's voice had the ghost hesitate even in its ire, "no more words." 

There was a defiance to Chace: he was the one to give the orders, not take them, and his features twisted with that urge for dominance, but when he opened his mouth, no words came, just a faint twist like a squeaker depressed too slowly. 

A small smile played at Olivia's mouth, and she tilted her head, watching him. It was this crueller side of her that she'd made the Council to combat. While she could have killed the Council, she'd made a point of making personal connections to most of them, and her tolerance for guilt was small enough to overpower her wish to act however she saw fit. It wasn't only for the contract that she didn't force Viktor Chace to move on; no, if she were being honest about this, she wanted to see Viktor suffer a little more than her simple and easy interference would give her. 

"Lina," Olivia beckoned, the weapon forming in her hands at will, as it had always been; they didn't have long before those that she had been closest to in her previous life noticed the spike of her power and the disappearance of the weapon, so they didn't have long. As if sensing this, before the weapon could fully form, Viktor turned eyes filled with pure hatred on Olivia, and disappeared. 

Hunter was limping and bloodied, but he smeared blood from his mouth to the gate and it croaked open with a pitiful whine, and Olivia handed Lina the weapon, the both of them stepping through as Hunter was picked up and thrown backwards under the onslaught of Viktor's rage; now directed, as it always had been, on someone more vulnerable to it. 

Olivia's wings flexed from her back, barely cushioning Hunter's landing because her wings were so unused to the quickness they were once used to. 

Her wings were weapons in themselves; only the true could touch them and not be sliced to ribbons, and Olivia noted that her faith in Hunter Dyan hadn't gone astray--but she wasn't anywhere near able to trust in Lina quite so much. 

Viktor threw Lina as he had Hunter, and Persephone growled lowly, her tattoos nearly bursting into being off her skin as her snake slithered from its place. The flowers were aconite and foxglove; nightshade and oleander. Persephone was angry, and when she got angry, the title of Iron Queen was never more suited. Viktor instinctively took a step back before his defiance reared its head again and tried to push him forward. 

Olivia watched Lina shake the rubble and dust off of herself as she rose from the ruins further ruined beneath her impact, but noted that Hunter was still slumped beneath where her wing had cushioned his landing; far too still. 

While Persephone's growl had been bad enough, Trystin's roar was much worse; the animal pain of it rattling the bones of even the immortal, and all three women turned towards the source of the sound, watching as the door of the cage swung open, and the shift from man to wolf took over without so much as an attempt at control.

Hunter was dead, Olivia realised; and as the godling took the form of the wolf, she knew that she had chosen wrong in prolonging Chace's suffering. She had chosen poorly in handing Lina the weapon that could cut down anything, even a ghost. 

Because now, Trystin was angry, and inhuman, and Olivia had no way of knowing what Trystin would do next. 

~

When Lina caught sight of the prison door swung open and the wolf emerging from it, Lina screamed; the sound dislodging even more of the crumbling infrastructure, but she didn't care if the city above them were to rain down on their heads. 

With Trystin freed, that meant Hunter was dead where he lay, and Lina didn't care that Viktor Chace was a man that overpowered the fear of god until it was just the fear of him; she didn't care that Hunter would have chosen this; she didn't care that Trystin wanted to tear the ghost standing before Olivia apart. She was angry, and there was nothing that would deter her from being the one to finally cut that bastard into the bite-sized pieces he deserved to be reduced to. 

Trystin and she were almost a mirror; the great, storm-grey wolf prowling towards the ghost as Lina did--their eyes full of the same all-consuming rage. 

Distantly, Lina knew that Olivia caught Persephone around the middle, holding her back from her advance. She could feel the anguish pulsing from the axe which Olivia had handed her; a weapon to turn one's sins in on themselves until the perpetrator of evil was consumed by the pain they'd caused. Lina wanted to use it slowly; wanted desperately to cut Viktor Chace into tiny pieces as if she could make sure that every shred of his twisted soul could experience the pain that had been inflicted on Hunter; the pain that had been inflicted on her by his loss. 

Trystin's wounds were older, but no less deep; and even as she watched, the wolf grew in size, filling out from a starved and skeletal form to that of a dire wolf in all its glory. 

"Go to Hell." Lina snarled, swinging the axe, just short of a fatal blow on a living creature; inflicting pain because she wanted suffering before she could ever feel vengeance had been taken. 

Chace fell back with a cry of agony that gave Lina a sense of ruthless victory, and Trystin snarled, hackles raised in this wolf-form; and together he and Lina began to slowly, agonizingly, close in on the general who had lost them both their one most-beloved.


	14. Chapter 14

No one else could see. Not even the wolf that had once been a godling; whose senses were supposed to be sharper than hers. Not even the Queen of the Underworld. Not even the phoenix.

Lina sat on the edge of her bed in the Sanctuary, Trystin curled up on the cushion they'd brought in for his wolf-form; the leap up to the beds and down from them a hassle when he was offered similar comforts with simple cushions. 

He hadn't turned back since Hunter's death; and Lina knew he wouldn't until the wounds had healed in his psyche. Knew that hearing his lover die, then watching the reincarnation willingly walk to his death was too much, even for one stronger than anyone else. 

Nothing else mattered; just the hole in the world where Lina had lost her own reasons to live, that Hunter had managed to fill and vacate within a day. 

The thing was, she knew she couldn't die. 

The thing was, Hunter and she were meant to go together, or else whoever was left would not be able to go at all. 

The thing was, Hunter's mother had stolen the life of Lina's father to fuel the life of her son, and Lina had been tied in to that magic even in the moments she was born. 

No one else could see. 

No one else could see Hunter put his hand on Lina's shoulder, his whiskey-coloured eyes worried, _"Are you with me? We have work to do."_


End file.
